I'm currently developing a browser extension, and was a bit shocked that I couldn't just load it on Firefox like on Chromium. It seems like such a basic thing, maybe that's because I'm a dev and expect that they will cater to development, but it was one of the first usability things where I preferred Chrome. I ditched iPhone for Android for similar reasons, and it seems that one thing Google does really well is make the developer workflow easy.
Any version of Firefox can load unpackaged addons for the current session. IIRC, with the CLI tool you can even auto-reload it as you make changes to source.