Thursday, April 25, 2013

Trying to let go of Firefox

For the last several months, have pondered switching my default desktop web browser from Firefox to Chrome.  The impetus came from Firefox occasionally freezing because of buggy Plugins (e.g. Adobe Acrobat or Shockwave Flash), enormous memory consumption (could be the result of me having 9+ tabs open!), or poor performance (streaming music from music.cbc.ca can be jittery).  The straw that broke the camel's back was that I could not update the Shockwave Flash plugin that was automatically disabled in Firefox due to security vulnerabilities.  While I appreciate Firefox trying to protect my computer and its data, I likely needed Administrator privileges to update the plugin and I did not have them on this client-provided workstation.   

The two main reasons I have stuck with Firefox are the Delicious and Selenium IDE Extensions.  So I thought that I could start up Firefox whenever I needed to use Selenium IDE for some script-automated web browsing.  But I still needed good Delicious integration with my web browser.  Hopeful, I sought out Delicious extensions for Chrome and tried "Delibookmarks (Delicious Bookmarks)" from yasinecky and "Delicious Bookmarks" from blog.kasunbg.org, both third-party extensions.  Unfortunately, neither were anywhere close to the functionality offered by the official Firefox Delicious extension.  Easily Bookmarking and searching saved Bookmarks across computers is essential for me and neither were usable to me. 

I briefly entertained using the Chrome Bookmarks functionality which I believe is synced across Chrome logins on different computers but the simple concept of tags was not supported out of the box.  So it appears I will soldier on with Firefox but I'm open to alternatives.