OK, Google has gone out of its way to make their browser fast, really fast. You pay the price for that, with perhaps more tracking items which can't be suppressed. I'm sort of the opinion that Google is also planting "super cookies", which can't be removed by normal methods such as CCleaner. (Which by the way has added, "monitoring" to its repertoire). In fact, it now installs itself a a "startup" entry. I yanked it, and still have older, passive version installers Which reminds me, I should put one of those in, if only to clean the browser cache, without loading a cmd terminal.
So, part of Chrome's speed is dependent on which scripts are loaded first. It's also alleged to be a memory hog. But from my experience, FF also uses more memory in Win 7, than it did/does in XP...
The "Flash suppression" methodology in FF can also cause issues, although I can't really say that's directly related to your complaint. However, on my web machine, using Flash in the "protected mode" generates some pretty bizarre symptoms
With those things said, I'm sort of upset with Google about how every minute update has become a "different version", and FF has been forced to go along with that. Under the old "update version terminology", you could tell how much work the browser (or any program) needed. Sic 1.01 (not much at all), 2.0 Whoa, now that is a major overhaul!.
At one point, someone wrote an add-on for FF to make it load as fast as Chrome. From what I gathered the script loading order was jumbled a bit, to match that of Chrome. But, the overall loading times of FF and Chrome are "supposed" to be very similar.
As far as configuring NoScript goes, IMHO, that's done very easily from the toolbar it adds to the browser Window.
It won't however, grant white listed permissions to anything other than the primary site while browsing in a private mode. In truth, you absolutely DO want it to forget many of the permissions you've granted, when you exit Firefox. It's another valuable safety feature.
I'd much rather take the extra time to re enter only permissions necessary to make a site work properly, even at sites which I visit frequently. You never know when someone might place a new malicious ad. In short, simply because a site was safe yesterday, doesn't guarantee it will be safe today.
But I suppose you kidz today are always in such a desperate hurry...