Not only I am leaving Medium, I am also switching my default browser from Chrome to Firefox, due to the concerns that Google is creeping in and intrude the my privacy and trust after reading the news 1 and 2.

It’s not the first time I tried to switch my main browser to Firefox, the last time I tried was when the first version of Quantum’s release. I heard it was shipped with its CSS engine from servo, I couldn’t help to download it and try it out. However, it wasn’t a successful attempt. There was bugs and issues I run into, apart from that, all of the extensions need to be migrated since the APIs and architectures are totally different. At the time when it was released, there wasn’t many good extensions migrated yet. But now most of my commonly used extensions are supported.

Extensions

Here are the list of the extensions I’ve installed so far.

• Facebook Containers
• Multi-Account Containers
• Firefox Lockwise
• OneTab
• Tampermonkey
• IG Helper
• Neat URL

I found that Facebook Containers is extremely useful, it works pretty much like sandbox account in Android. Neat URL is also convenient in that I don’t have to manually remove those tracking parameters when I copy & paste the url to others.

Issues

It’s not working perfectly without any issue though. I’ve run into the following situations.

• FB Messenger not able to load, not sure it is because I set the content blocking rules too strict.
• Google Drive often hits to high cpu usage when the folders have many items.
• Random high cpu spike when open on certain web pages.

It seems that when I open web pages that heavily use javascript or css, my laptop’s fan would inevitably start to work. Unlike Chrome it would also eat up battery but not to the extent of triggering the cpu’s fan running. Not sure it is due to both of browsers’ javascript engines difference.

Summary

It is not without issue but it is good enough that I am happy to set it as my main browser, and get rid of the sneaky Google.

I was a happy user of medium until they started to raise the paywall due to they need to manage to turn it into a business not losing a lot of money. I am quite OK with paying or accept that the website needs to inject ads or something else to generate revenue. However, the way the medium has been doing is annoying. They put up the warning on the top of your write-ups saying that it is not behind the paywall, and you could not hide it by clicking it away, every time you visit the page it would show, and only the author would see it.

One of the benefit of Medium is that it comes with an app that I could simply just edit a write-up while I am traveling (though it could not be used without internet). I also found the replacement which is MWeb markdown editor. I could edit the writeup offline and easily publish it to the platforms supported. The Medium’s app is no longer exclusive benefit to me.

I decided to move back to the static site generator. I updated the Hakyll’s theme and make it as clean as possible. I was using the old Caspor theme but this time I used purecss to make one by myself. It is responsive and look very clean with all the white color around it. Without those large size javascript and css files need to be loaded, my static website loaded much faster as well, and I have full access to edit it as much as I like. This static website is also run on the digitalocean’s managerd kubernetes.

My journey so far has been Octopress, Hakyll, Medium, and then move back to Hakyll.