[citation][nom]gm0n3y[/nom]Have you ever tried Chrome vs IE or FF on any AJAX intensive site? Chrome is noticably faster. Internet connections are fast enough nowadays that it usually takes no more than 1-2 seconds to get the data. Chrome just feels 'snappier'.[/citation]
I use a lot of browsers (FF2, FF3, O9, O10, Chrome, Safari, MSIE6,7,8, Seamonkey, Konqueror... - as a web dev I have to) and connection speed (latency and bandwidth) are the only parameters that I see having any effect on page loading speed. AJAX itself is just a way to send requests and receive responses from servers without reloading the page and it doesn't affect the loading speed (since the whole point of AJAX is that it's used after the page is loaded).
The actual speed differences within browsers are fractions of a second. I honestly can't feel such differences when I use the browsers, especially when server response times, routes and ping times vary wildly between sites, times of day and the current status of my internet connection.