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.