Why I Left Firefox For Chrome And Why I Came Back
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jul 18, 2011
Last weekend I finally had it with Firefox. After one more crash because it was blowing up my resources I decided it was time to give up the ghost and I switched to Chrome.
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I had two other alternatives, of course. I could have gone to Opera, which has always been pretty fast, but it just seems so sparse. True, one should probably only think about using a browser to browse the internet, but many of us are looking for certain things from our browsers to enhance the user experience, if you will. I also could have gone to IE8 but decided I just don’t want to go backwards, even though I’ve heard good things about IE9, which I haven’t loaded yet.
Anyway, Firefox had suddenly decided to go nuts on me. It was using some major league resources on my computer, once to the tune of 1.8GB; that’s a lot. It was regularly going over a gigabyte, and that was way too much. Then it started crashing all the time, asking me to send crash reports to Mozilla. Last Sunday it crashed the 7th time in one day and that was that.
So I made Chrome my default browser. I had been thinking about it anyway, but not without some reservation. It’s a Google product, as you know, and almost anything related to Google wants to track you. I wrote a post in 2010 telling people that if you use Google Toolbar it tracks your searches and then you start getting targeted advertising. I know they try to tell us it’s for our benefit but I just don’t feel the benefit if you know what I mean. At least you can turn it off for Google Desktop.
I used Chrome for about 4 days and started to feel that, though it had been running better than Firefox, it had issues as well. For instance, every once in awhile it just hangs for a little bit. I went to check the resources and found that it was using a gigabyte of memory as well; what the hey? It seemed to handle that much memory a little better than Firefox but not entirely; that was shocking.
Then I started missing some of my customization. For instance, I was able to modify the look of Firefox to what I was used to in the past; you can’t do that with Chrome. Also, certain plugins that make using a browser that I’ve come to like aren’t available on Chrome. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t figure out how to get anything onto Chrome whatsoever. Well, I did finally get one thing to work, but that was it.
Yup, I started missing Firefox, but I had to do something to help it stop crashing. I decided to take a look at all the plugins I was running, along with other things, to see what I really didn’t need anymore. I ended up disabling, then removing, a lot of things that I noticed didn’t even work anymore. Firefox 5 automatically disabled some thing it said it wasn’t compatible with, but I use both Stylish and Greasemonkey and it turns out some scripts with each of those weren’t working anymore either, and could have been causing a conflict.
The verdict is pretty good so far. The highest recorded memory since I made the changes is 525MB, which is easily more manageable. The browser hasn’t crashed since I started using it again and I’m happy about that as well. Maybe it’s finally going to behave; one can only hope, right?
But customization is really what puts Firefox ahead of every other browser, and in the end that’s really why it’s my favorite. That’s my story; what’s yours?
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Google Toolbar Tracks Your Movements
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Feb 4, 2010
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Do you have Google Toolbar installed on your browser? I do, and I have to admit that I find it as a convenience in two ways. One, I know I can click on the Google button and it’ll pull up the Google search page. Two, I also use Google Desktop, and the icon for it sits on the toolbar, easy to find.
One thing I’ve rarely done, however, is type my search term into the little box next to the button. I almost never think about it sitting there. What’s funny is that, as I look up there now, I see the search terms I typed into the actual Google window the last time I was there waiting for me, as if I’m going to type them in again. That’s a quick way to search for something; I wonder why I have rarely used it.
Turns out there might have been a good reason not to do it, and I was just lucky. It seems that every time you put a search term into that little window and click the button, you’re sending information to Google telling them what you’re searching for. They in turn use that information to try to target ads specifically to you based on where you live and what you’ve been searching for. They store this information away, waiting for the next time you use it so they can do more calculations, trying to figure you out.
It seems this has been written about often enough, but I’ve always missed it. The last article I saw comes from Mashable, where they found that even if you disable the tracking part of the toolbar it still continues to track your movements.
Of course, you can look at that and gripe, or you can decide to gripe about the issue of Adsense reducing its payments from 75% to 72% to its publishers, of which most of us are. Man, working on getting our money coming or going; how fair is that?
Best Free Software Two
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on May 24, 2009
I hope you enjoyed the first part of this little series on the best free software, and now here’s some more you may or may not known about.
Blogger – Those of you who are long time readers of this blog know how much I hate going to Blogger blogs, so this might seem like an odd contradiction for me. This is probably the easiest way for people to get into blogging if they want to explore what the world of blogging is all about. However, if you’re looking to really do something with a blog, get out! 
WordPress – We’ve gone from my least favorite to my most favorite. Maybe you can’t totally customize everything, but there’s thousands of themes, and if you have any knowledge whatsoever you can change different things on all of them. Of course, this is a WordPress blog; yeah!
Meebo – I actually wrote a post on Meebo in February, so you know this will probably be a positive review. It’s an online service that allows you to connect to multiple IM’s at the same time. Yes, there are many other services that do this, but the beauty of it is that you can add a window to a website and, if you’re logged in, people who visit your website can talk to you. Read my post and see the images I showed from one of my business sites.
Trillian – If you don’t want to be locked into having to use a browser to access multiple IM’s, then Trillian is the way to go. I use Trillian more often than Meebo, I have to admit, mainly because I don’t want to hold what I call office hours all the time, and if I’m signed onto Meebo I will be.
Google Toolbar – Almost as much as I love Google Desktop, I love having Google Toolbar on my browser. Sure, most browsers today have something built in already, but there’s just something about having the toolbar wherever I decide to place it that works well for me.
Greasemonkey – I’m surprised I’ve never really written about Greasemonkey except in passing a couple of times, but I love this thing. What it does is allows you to change certain things on webpages you visit that either you want to eliminate, or that you want to look differently. As opposed to Stylish, which changes the entire look of a site, Greasemonkey is more specific. For instance, on Facebook, I’ve added a couple of scripts which make the pictures bigger if I hover over them, and I’ve added one that eliminates some of the advertising, though not all of it; I might have to go back and take care of the rest of it at some point.
PDF995 -I actually loved a different program, but that’s before I ended up with a Vista computer, which wouldn’t run the sucker. This program works pretty well, and it’s free, but with the free version you have to deal with a little bit of advertising every time you use it. But it gets the job done, which is creating pdf files.
And there you go. I hope you’ve enjoyed this, and found something useful.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Firefox 3 Experiment Is Over For Now
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jul 6, 2008
Man, I hate when things don’t go right.
If you’re a regular reader, you’ll remember when I wrote about my excitement that Firefox 3 was coming. Then you later read where I said I’d downloaded the program and was testing it, and there were some good things and some bad things, but the jury was still out.
The jury has come to a decision, and it’s not good. The Firefox 3 experiment is over, done, finished. I’ve decided that, for now, it’s just not worth the trouble and the things I lost. So, I’ve spent about 10 minutes getting rid of it, then getting rid of the latest update, and starting from scratch again. Well, maybe not all the way, as I didn’t get rid of my bookmarks or anything else, but you know what I mean.
What was the main thing? There actually was a main thing this time around, and it was the Google Toolbar. Seems it was incompatible with the new version, and trying to run Google Desktop was almost impossible also. I probably rely on that more than anything else, so that was a really big deal to me.
Then there were the smaller things. For instance, TwitterFox for Firefox 3 just wasn’t going to work. Actually, it worked for 2 days, and that was that; irritating as sin. I hadn’t realized how dependent I’d gotten on it, but I have. Another add-on I really like is colorful tabs, as I tend to have a bunch of tabs open at once, and the colors help separate them so you know where they are. That may seem odd, but it’s the truth. And there were a bunch of smaller add-ons and some of the themes I’d downloaded before that I liked that just wouldn’t work in Firefox 3 either; heck, my few Greasemonkey scripts wouldn’t work either, though all my userstyles did work.
And finally, it didn’t save anything on my resources, which is had promised to do. Yes, it was a little bit faster, and I really noticed it with Facebook, but heck, I’m on cable; that little bit of slowness on Facebook isn’t worth all the other things I’ve had to give up by switching over.
So, I’m back to my original version, 2.0, though I’ve now run the update back to 2.0.0.15 for security purposes, and my Google Toolbar is sitting there smiling at me. Sometimes we have to learn those lessons, and this is the first time Firefox has failed me. Maybe one day all will be right with the world once again; but not now, unfortunately.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010-2011 Mitch Mitchell
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