Seems like there is still a significant amount of initial latency by waiting for the first-byte of the HTML before making the subsequent requests for the dependent resources.
To actually minimize latency the server should understand what resources the HTML file is dependent on, and eagerly send those in addition to the request resource. i.e.
client: send me index.html and dependent resources
server: here is index.html, along with
other initial resources you didn't ask
for but will need
I'm not sure I'm reaching the same conclusion.
- Chrome is taking 618ms to load / vs 412 ms on FF.
- FF loads all the .css & .js at 320ms as well as first 8 imgs
- CH loads all the .css & .js at ~600ms as well as first 8 imgs
Before chalking up the advantage to dependency-based prioritization (which may be a good thing-I don't know) I would first explain why fetching "/" is so much slower on chrome.
Are your timings based off of a single run each for Firefox and Chrome? The web is a very noisy place; to get good timing data you need to run many tests. WebPageTest (www.webpagetest.org) can be a good way to do this.
(I work on PageSpeed, and we need to run tests like this often.)