I'm sorry for that bad experience. If you were instructed to change tools or given a warning prior to termination, the termination might be justified on grounds of insubordination, but not on merit.
Either way, that place you just left carries a bigger red flag than you.
> I'm not sure what to do next.
Keep learning, get more experience, apply to the next job.
What is most shocking about it all, is they have an Angular app, which they are thinking of moving to React, which is why they hired me. On the basis of my React and JS skills. They trusted me to get up-to speed on Angular, but dismissed me because I use Firefox? Don't want the job back, I'm just feeling that people should not feel free to d*ck others around like this. How will I explain all this on my resume?
You don't. Omit that job.
But if pressed you can honestly say that you have no idea what the problem was, you performed your requests, and you were given no warning. In any case that was beyond your control and didn't turn into a real job.
IMHO it's better to cast around for the best possible honest framing of the issue.
One of them even codenamed it "the cloth of protection" lol.
As others have said, the correct thing to do here is to just not even list the job on the resume in the first place. No reasonable person expects every single short stint be listed on a resume. I’ve heard three and six months suggested as guidelines for the minimum lengths of jobs one should list. Anything shorter than that probably isn’t worth going into, as you’re still onboarding at that point. Also, people get sick, have sudden illnesses in the family, or otherwise can’t work for a couple months for loads of reasons.
And I concede that a policy of honesty might only make sense in some world views / ethical positions.
FWIW, there are ways to not reveal that info, but also not lie.
For example, if a recruiter / employer starts fishing for my current salary, I just say "I'm not going to talk about that, but ...", followed by some carefully worded signal about my general salary expectations.
If lying in this context doesn't bother you in the slightest, then maybe you won't see value in this approach.
So it is more like a 3 month gap.
> Jobs at this time are hard to come by. The biggest employers in the industry have laid off hundreds of thousands. There is a lot of competition for every position.
It's a 3 week gap, just omit it. If anyone asks, you were looking for a new job.
I've had jobs I didn't add to my resume because I don't want anything to do with those shitty companies ever again.
Nobody has ever questioned the <6 month gaps.