Goodbye Firefox Its Been Fun, Hello Chrome My Cool New Friend.

Time to move on: Moving from mainly using Firefox to mainly using Chrome.

Reasons and Rationalisations:

Google:

I use a lot of Google services and I own a lot of Google devices.

Security is top notch and updates are pushed out fast, but in a way that does not bug users.

Chrome is now mature enough that I can find equivalent extensions to those in Firefox.

e.g. I have found an extension “Sidewise Tree Style Tab” that allows me to have usable vertical tab stacking.

Chrome is developing a technical lead and will be developed at quite a fast pace for the foreseeable future.

Chrome updating does not break extensions.

Although I don’t trust Google as much as I do Mozilla (banking will still be a Firefox activity), I still trust them a lot.

Mozilla:

Mozilla’s treatment of the RSS LiveBookMarks feature was for me a turning point, instead of updating the feature, it was largely emasculated.

And in point of fact the Chrome extension, RSS Live Links, looks to be a better long term proposition than my favourite Firefox extension Boox, :-( go figure.

A New World:

So here we go a whole new world to get used to :-o

This should be fun :-)

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The next few articles will note any useful tips on using and configuring Chrome.

I will back link them all here to make it easer for anyone making the same journey.

Notes: The Best Chrome Extensions For An Ex Firefox User.

Notes: Chrome’s Built In Page Zoom and Minimum Font Size – No Need For An Extension? Probably.

MOZILLA Y U HATE RSS?!?

The day they killed RSS (Livemarks) on Firefox

Yeah that about sums up my feelings on the matter :-|

Mozilla and Firefox had a great idea with their original implementation of RSS, “Livemarks” but they didn’t build on that success or promote it to users, instead they tried to hide it, and now the latest blow… the emasculation of Livemarks.

Bug 613588 – (livemarksIO) Replace livemarks with asynchronous load-on-demand livemarks

Three major changes in Firefox: 1) Live Bookmarks are loaded “on demand,” instead of Firefox checking for new items in the background; 2) Live Bookmarks are handled asynchronously, which prevents Firefox from locking up whenever feed items are stored or accessed; and 3) Live Bookmark items are no longer considered “bookmarks,” speeding up the display of and searches for actual bookmarks. The basic rationale for these changes is presented here by the developer who eventually coded them. The reasons all make perfect sense

[here].

So… do the dev’s really hate RSS and are they trying to kill it off completely in the coming Firefox versions?

Well the signs don’t look great…

This Bug was posted on the 20th of June 2012 and still no sign of a fix…

It affects 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18.

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So is even this watered down version of RSS going to wither on the vine?

Time will tell but things are not looking good for the future of RSS on Firefox, not good at all :-(

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Note: A possible ray of hope:

Marco Bonardo [:mak] 2012-02-27 05:28:13 PST

(In reply to Girish Sharma from comment #105)
> Is there a way to disable this feature?, so as to load the livemarks
> automatically, without the need of going to each livemarks and waiting for
> it to load ?

Until bug 725964 is at least made better, updating livemarks is expensive. We don’t want our users to pay that cost they may not need (thus why the livemark load on access). That said, I’m evaluating making a really simple restartless add-on for users willing to pay that price.

Firefox: Bootstrapped Extensions, No Restart Required!

Well this is interesting news from Mozilla, the company behind Firefox.

Of course we will need some examples to confirm that this approach is useful.

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Quote:

Bootstrapped add-ons exist as a means of restricting what is available to an add-on in order to allow it to be loaded and unloaded without restarting the application.

Backwards Compatibility

Older versions of Firefox do not know about the em:bootstrap flag or bootstrap.js file but with care it is possible to make the same XPI usable in both cases. Older versions would just treat it as a normal add-on requiring a restart to install and uninstall and loading components and chrome from the normal places. Newer versions will ignore the components and chrome and just load the bootstrap.js. [link]

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