>I had trouble getting two different versions of Firefox to not interfere with one another
This shouldn't be an issue if you run your secondary instance with -no-remote -profile="your separate profile".
>Using Chrome for casual browsing was just less of a headache.
That still doesn't answer the original question though. Why choose chrome over firefox, when it has no legacy firefox extensions? Does chrome have those legacy extensions' features built in? Was chrome better than firefox, and the only thing keeping you on was the legacy extensions?