I've played a bit with Chrome, and it seems a bit faster to me (with Firefox being noticeably faster than IE), but I have not done any real study on this. I suspect Chrome may be faster because it is not overloaded with eye candy that adds nothing to the content being proffered...
I don't know about faster but it is surely more stable. I downloaded it after once again getting the IE must shut down message. When using IE I seem to get that one about once every 10 minutes. With Chrome, never...