I love FF I’ve been using it for well over a decade but it runs like absolute ass on my pc. I downloaded chrome to test the waters and it’s so much faster but now I feel like a shit for letting even more google into my life (already use youtube, gmail and search). Is there a hidden 3rd option I just don’t know about?
For some things, mostly JavaScript heavy sites, Chromium-based browsers are just better optimized. I definitely feel this on mobile - for web apps, Firefox is a little slower and uses a lot more battery. For everything else, though, Firefox performance is about the same, while using less memory. Before giving up on Firefox, you might want to try a userscript to tune performance. Betterfox is basically the standard here.
You also need an adblocker so that your computer doesn’t waste resources on rendering unnecessary things, but on a low-powered computer, there’s a trade-off to be made between effectiveness and performance. uBlock Origin is the gold standard adblocker, but on a literal potato you might actually want to try uBlock Origin Lite.
He could also consider giving NoScript a try (taking into account that many websites will completely break without temporarily being set to trusted).