Yeah Safari is faster, on OS X anyway.
Google Chrome Beta shits on Firefox in terms of speed but it's not faster than Safari. My problem with Safari is that it takes too long to open up a tab because it does all that predictive shit where it lays out your most visited sites and for people walking behind me in the library, it's not a good thing. I'd switch over to Safari though, still, but I started using Firefox and it has a lot of saved passwords in different porn sites that still magically work and for some reason, Safari nor Chrome will successfully import that shit.