Firefox 18 Posts Speed Gains Over Chrome, Mozilla Says
Mozilla's Mark Côté has reminded us that the arewefastyet page, which the browser maker launched prior to the introduction of Firefox 4, is still alive and is now tracking the progress of Mozilla IonMonkey JIT.
Though not an official statement made by Mozilla, Côté says that Firefox 18 (with IonMonkey) is now 16 percent faster than Chrome 21 in Mozilla's own Kraken benchmark, while it remains behind Chrome in V8 and behind Chrome in Sunspider. Mozilla's own test page suggests that IonMonkey has improved from a time of 1991 ms with the first release of IonMonkey in Firefox in mid-August to currently 1933 ms. Chrome has improved from 2038 ms to 2019 ms in the same time frame.
Mozilla does not yet support Google's latest browser benchmark Octane in its comparison. In a recent evaluation on Mozilla Hacks, Alon Zakai argued that Octane has some flaws and that there may be, for example, too much emphasis on Mandreel, which Google uses in its Chrome Web Store but may not be so important on web pages overall.
Zakai noted that "Octane is an interesting new benchmark that, even with [some] problems […], does contain good ideas and is worth focusing on." Yet he points out that no single benchmark is perfect and we "should always be aware of the limitations of any single benchmark, especially when a single benchmark claims to represent the entire modern web."

One of the few Projects that get constant progress reports is Snappy (related to responsiveness of FF), you may take a look at it here. It may not be much of a consolation, but it shows that they are working on it seriously.
Chrome does have GPU acceleration. Smooth scrolling you can download an extension. Smooth font rendering, well I'm still looking for that one.
I might have to give FireFox a whirl again.
Officially, yes. You could, however, use Beta (v16), Aurora (v17), or Nightly (v18). Personally having used all of them I find Aurora to be stunningly stable and all around more enjoyable to use than any other browser. Stay away from Nightly, though, it's a plague of epic bookmark deleting proportions.
Chrome does have smooth scrolling. Under chrome://flags/ just enable Smooth Scrolling.
I updated it today, and the 64-bit (and I think the 32-bit may also be) version shouldn't have been released (today), since it doesn't even run. And since I run that version as my default browser, oops!
(And yes, obviously I have backup browsers for just this kind of case, in fact, I'm currently running the release version of Firefox, so yes, I think I have a pretty good handle on things, tyfm...)
...said no-one ever.
Seriously, NoScript or GTFO.
Isn't this actually Firefox 4.66?