@LaloFG: you're not helping Opera, since Firefox wasn't praised for "barely winning some tests" as you say, but for almost never loosing and almost always being at least decent - Opera is a nice browser, but this Grand Prix shows what I've always felt about it: Opera isn't very well-rounded. It has definite strengths, but also many glaring weaknesses - personally, that's why I only use it sparingly.
Adding stuff to Firefox would defeat the aim of such an article - that of being a fair comparison on what currently makes a good browser. And, right now, Firefox embodies a good all-around browser - fast, reliable, with good support for most Web technologies. The fact that it can be expanded and configured to match the whims of its user is its best selling point, and that it's Free Software backed by a foundation that relies on principles more than on their bottom line is also quite reassuring - as long as we have Firefox, we'll have a free Web.
Something like that can't be said about Opera, which added support for many non-standard features found in IE5-6, or Chrome which depends on a search engine maker that will gladly take your private data... Of course, the worst offenders are IE and Safari, because Google at least has the decency of actively maintaining the Chromium (FOSS version of Chrome) project, and the Opera staff always vocally defended open specifications and championed them.
Now, YMMV: Chrome is indeed minimalist - but not much more than IE9, and it is actually good enough to be used as a main browser if all you do is hit Google for all your Internet needs - and that does cover a lot of them. It is also reasonably fast and stable.
Opera has more features than Chrome or "vanilla" Firefox, it is also quite stable and faster than previous generation browsers. However, its interface can be rather confusing (it doesn't match with other browsers, although this has gotten less true recently), it is hard to configure to suit your needs (settings are obscure and not numerous) and it cannot be expanded. In short, it fails as a basic browser (Chrome is better at that) and it fails as an advanced browser (Firefox with addons wins there).
I'll give you a simple example: I build websites. For that, I need a debugger console and preferably a DOM tree that allows me to edit a page element's properties. In Chrome, I only need to press F12. In Firefox, I can install a couple of addons in under a minute, that almost transform the browser into an IDE. Even in IE9, I merely need to press F12 to get advanced tools. In Opera, I need to enable debugging, then download obscure extra components and install them to get what I get in other browsers.
If for example, I don't want to use Opera to track my .torrent files (it's too basic), it's a pain to disable the torrent tracker and then pass the torrent to an external app - in short, Opera is the Apple of Web browsers: it's nice, it looks good, it works well, but if you want to do things that weren't planned by the developers, you lose.
Finally, I'll add that Firefox is the browser that pisses me off the least in multiplatform support - it runs almost the same on Windows or Linux, nevermind the actual hardware - I get the same reaction on Windows7, Linux 32-bit on an underpowered netbook, or a quad-core Linux 64-bit desktop. Opera is flaky on Linux, and Chrome differs too much from Chromium to be interesting (Chrome on Linux is a pain to maintain, so I don't use it).
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