I'm just guessing here, but Chrome is not packaged by the distro whilst Firefox is. Personally I like the tar. That's my preferred way to use Firefox in Debian

I'm just guessing here, but Chrome is not packaged by the distro whilst Firefox is. Personally I like the tar. That's my preferred way to use Firefox in Debian. I untar on ~/apps/firefox, symlink to my ~/bin and it is ready to go. The auto-update of Firefox works perfect, so I don't need to use Debian packages for that.