my local development /etc/hosts redirect works only on chrome
I think I just found the answer to this problem. If you are working on a virtual machine, as I am, and you change the /etc/hosts file in your virtual linux machine, only chrome will detect that. You will need to change the hosts file in windows (c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts) in order to force firefox to check the table. The moment I change that file, firefox recognized the new mapped names.