That seems hard to believe as it would imply that they have code specifically to cripple the Firefox experience. It's probably at worst that they intentionally don't optimize their sites for Firefox and not actively making it worse.
Google does a lot of UA sniffing, and serves different sites to different browsers.
The sites served to non-Chrome receive less QA resources, as far as I can tell, and are often buggy in various ways. Simply spoofing the Chrome UA in Firefox on Android can often get you a site that works better (in Firefox) than the one served to Firefox by default.
Sometimes this happens on the desktop as well, they optimize for the latest Chrome and the "latest" Firefox ESR - so here we are, Chrome is the reincarnation of IE6'6'6 the definition of evil in the software world.