I don't run into CAPTCHA loops with Firefox. Have you tried changing your user agent to pretend to be Firefox on Windows or Mac? I've heard Linux users are more likely to be interpreted as bots.

> * infinite loop of Cloudflare verification * inferior performance compared to Chrome (page loading, large page scrolling) * subtle bugs (e.g. audio handling)

The first two are likely due to extensions rather than the core Firefox. I find at least as many cases where it’s faster, and it usually uses less memory. The third one has high variability - I’ve reported enough bugs against all of the major browsers not to trust any of them but these days there are a lot of web developers who only test on Chrome and half of the time I find what appears to be a bug in Safari or Firefox it’s really an unnecessary reliance on something Chrome specific.

Probably wants to share state though (cookie jar, history, password manager, etc)

The bottom line is that Google invests more in Chrome than Mozilla can afford to invest in Ff, so the latter will likely never catch up in features or performance.