It's not clear which version of the extension was initially submitted for Firefox approval: the one with the redundant permission or the one without. If the latter, even though I'm inclined to believe Mozilla probably do have a more developer-friendly process in place, it's not really a fair comparison.

> So we created a Firefox developer account, submitted our extension, and girded ourselves for another rough ride.

Again, if the permissions had been fixed by this point, and Google had accepted it, why would you assume a rough ride from Mozilla?