What version of Chrome are you running? Most people running Chrome have no idea that it's going through major version upgrades all the time.
The curse of Firefox is the extensibility. Chrome has had a more limited, but growing extension system, and it isn't brittle like the one in Firefox.
Jetpack is the project to bring a Chrome like plugin layer to Firefox, which will handle the needs of 95% of addons, and should greatly ease the upgrade pain when developers start switching over to it.
It was only released widely a week ago, so there's still some time before it's ubiquitous, but when it is the upgrade pain for users and developers goes away.
TL;DR:
Firefox is doing the right thing, but there will be a bit of pain before things get better.