Yep. You can't use google hangouts without chrome. I've seen other websites (non-google) doing the same. Chrome is the new IE it seems :(
Meet did start to work in latest Firefox recently, and then this week they broke mic audio. -.-
Joking aside, I've never really known the difference between Google Talk, Hangouts, etc, but I regularly chat with my contacts from the Gmail website, using Firefox, without any problem so far.