Chrome is designed for web apps. If you keep several apps open in Firefox, like say Gmail, FastMail, Slack, Gitter, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp Web and Google Music or YouTube, pretty soon Firefox ends up being really, really sluggish. And I keep these apps pinned, and the startup experience for Firefox gets horrible.
Firefox also has problems with many services, where loading a single link can make your whole browser unresponsive for a long time or even crash it. To see what I mean, load this Travis log in Firefox and compare with Chrome: https://travis-ci.org/monixio/monix/builds/148774867 ; and this is just one sample, there are others that bother me, like the OpenTSDB UI. Personally I don't keep 200 tabs open, because I'm focusing on just a few at a time. If I want to go back to something valuable, I use bookmarks (or more recently Pinboard.in). This is because tabs are hard to manage and search, unless you have one of those fancy extensions, but I dislike those as well.
On add-ons, I very much appreciate Mozilla having a good review process, but those add-ons have no isolation and everything is allowed to run even in private mode.
The fact is, if I can't comfortably run my web apps in Firefox, I'll keep going back to Chrome. And yes I keep trying using native apps, like Thunderbird and Adium/Pidgin. It isn't working out.