Firefox -> Chrome, First Impressions
So Firefox was bogging down on me, lots of choking on scripts for gmail and google docs, bloating up to gobble most of my RAM, and all of the bad behavior that I recall not-so-fondly from the Netscape-on-Solaris days (anyone else who has run Netscape on Solaris feels my pain.) Particularly aggravating was a session sync bug that caused it to lock up entirely for several seconds about every ten or fifteen seconds. Since I depend heavily on sessions and browser state to remember what the heck I was doing, it was time to try out Chrome!
So far I am really liking it. It's very fast and doesn't seem to lock up as easily. It handles a few things differently from Firefox, but I haven't had much trouble figuring out the differences. It handles Google apps very well (of course.)
I really like pinning tabs. I tend to keep some windows up all the time, and it's a very clean way to handle that.
I haven't tested the sync yet, but it syncs extensions too? If that works cleanly I will love it. Setting up a new browser is a PITA. Having it save my session history, bookmarks, and other settings into the cloud is very nice.
The extension model worries me a bit -- all extensions seem to ask for all website data and then promise they'll only use what they need. Isn't there a better way to encapsulate that? It's possible that Firefox is every bit as bad but doesn't admit it, but I think extensions there at least go through a review process? I am only running extensions from sources I already trust with that level of data, like Evernote.
The only site I've run into so far that didn't operate properly was nutritiondata.com (searching on foods to add to a recipe) and honestly that site is pretty flaky in Firefox, too.
I have also tried to fix some of my habits to reduce tabsplosions, which is a lot of why Firefox was locking up, but Firefox was having performance problems even when I had a pretty clean tab setup that was only my pinned tabs, so I don't know that it would have fully fixed it.
So far so good. Haven't run into anything I do often that doesn't work. In general it is working better. And the switch was a good time to work on tab clutter habits.
I'm also trying out diigo.com as a replacement for delicious.com. It imported things and can export things and takes new bookmarks, so that's all good, Yahoo can jump up and down on the corpse of Delicious for all I care now (why did they bother to buy it if they didn't know what it was good for, I wonder?) The predictive tagging is a little rougher than delicious was, and it's noisier than del.icio.us though cleaner than Yahoo made it in recent days. I'm thinking of looking twice at pinboard as it can integrate directly with instapaper, which is pretty sweet; I'm using instapaper to keep my tabs under control.
This has all been happening verrrry slowly as I've been insanely sleepy and sick this week, so I am pleased that chrome was simple enough for me to install and configure in my current state. (Diigo too... importing from delicious was a snap, though it took a little while as they batch it.)
So far I am really liking it. It's very fast and doesn't seem to lock up as easily. It handles a few things differently from Firefox, but I haven't had much trouble figuring out the differences. It handles Google apps very well (of course.)
I really like pinning tabs. I tend to keep some windows up all the time, and it's a very clean way to handle that.
I haven't tested the sync yet, but it syncs extensions too? If that works cleanly I will love it. Setting up a new browser is a PITA. Having it save my session history, bookmarks, and other settings into the cloud is very nice.
The extension model worries me a bit -- all extensions seem to ask for all website data and then promise they'll only use what they need. Isn't there a better way to encapsulate that? It's possible that Firefox is every bit as bad but doesn't admit it, but I think extensions there at least go through a review process? I am only running extensions from sources I already trust with that level of data, like Evernote.
The only site I've run into so far that didn't operate properly was nutritiondata.com (searching on foods to add to a recipe) and honestly that site is pretty flaky in Firefox, too.
I have also tried to fix some of my habits to reduce tabsplosions, which is a lot of why Firefox was locking up, but Firefox was having performance problems even when I had a pretty clean tab setup that was only my pinned tabs, so I don't know that it would have fully fixed it.
So far so good. Haven't run into anything I do often that doesn't work. In general it is working better. And the switch was a good time to work on tab clutter habits.
I'm also trying out diigo.com as a replacement for delicious.com. It imported things and can export things and takes new bookmarks, so that's all good, Yahoo can jump up and down on the corpse of Delicious for all I care now (why did they bother to buy it if they didn't know what it was good for, I wonder?) The predictive tagging is a little rougher than delicious was, and it's noisier than del.icio.us though cleaner than Yahoo made it in recent days. I'm thinking of looking twice at pinboard as it can integrate directly with instapaper, which is pretty sweet; I'm using instapaper to keep my tabs under control.
This has all been happening verrrry slowly as I've been insanely sleepy and sick this week, so I am pleased that chrome was simple enough for me to install and configure in my current state. (Diigo too... importing from delicious was a snap, though it took a little while as they batch it.)