DEV Community

miku86
miku86

Posted on

Diary - 2018.09.26

My attempt to change from Chrome to Firefox

Today, after reading the news about Google, I gave Firefox a new shot.

I tried a change from Chrome to Firefox several times in the past, but never finished it completely and always came back to Chrome, mostly because of my laziness to really get into Firefox.

My two biggest concerns:

  1. all extensions for daily use are available
  2. adequate substitute for syncing my Chrome favorites

All extensions for daily use are available (?!)

my chrome extensions

So I went to Firefox Add-ons and searched for all extensions.

Only these three extensions weren't available: Markdown New Tab, Pesticide (=> Open Pesticide), WasteNoTime (=> LeechBlock NG).

👍

Adequate substitute for syncing my Chrome favorites (?!)

I've found Firefox Sync and a Comparison of Browser Synchronizers.

👍👍


Installing Firefox

Because I want to use the latest Developer perks, I've decided to use Firefox Developer Edition.

Went to the Firefox Homepage, only found a tar.bz2 file, so normally only raw files and no auto-updates.

I looked on Stackoverflow and askubuntu and found some instructions How to install Firefox Developer Edition on Ubuntu and used Ubuntu Make, because the PPA solution did install the normal Firefox edition.

Afterwards, I read about privacy on a German site, installed some add-ons (not all), changed my standard search engine to searx and made some other settings.

my firefox add-ons

I set up a Firefox Sync account, exported my Chrome bookmarks into a HTML file, imported them in Firefox.

All in all, this took me 4hrs, including some minor issues with creating a proper Ubuntu Dash shortcut and some other stuff.


Insights so far

  • Firefox is really fast on my PC (Intel i5, 8GB RAM, SSD). On my Raspi, it's incredibly slow, even one tab
  • every (!) webpage/webapp (dev.to, github, kanbanflow, deepl, tinypng etc.), I've visited, is unusable without JavaScript (I set NoScript to default: no JS)
  • most of the useful search results are from Google

Do you have additional tips or hints?

Top comments (0)