And Now for Chrome ...

In the Beginning...

For a brief time in my teenaged years I used Netscape. At some point, I changed to Mozilla/Firefox and I never looked back.  I was a solid convert.

Internet Explorer never cut it for me, and it still doesn't.  Like so many things Microsoft comes out with, their user-friendliness makes no sense to me and I fumble over it all the time.

When Chrome was released I tried it briefly.  I could never find what I wanted to do (bookmarks, history, settings, etc.) and I had actually been quite happy with Firefox, so I just uninstalled it.  I had only tried it on the excitement of a new thing from Google, and the recommendation of a friend.  Later again, the same friend reassured me it had improved even more.  But basically, my contentedness with Firefox left me with no desire or need to try anything else.

Disillusionment

But that has changed.  A few months ago, my laptop (an under-performing mini from Acer that really isn't fit for Windows 7) started getting bogged down to the point where I couldn't even shut it down properly.  I found some online fixes, including registry and graphics adjustments.  They helped a lot, but not completely. Although it had stopped freezing up, it still slowed down to the point where I would have to waste half an hour closing everything and shutting down (that's how slow it was) and restarting to make it work properly.

And then came the shocking realization.

Could it be that some service or function of my dear Firefox was causing the problem?  I had realized that the slowdowns only happened when Firefox was running.  In fact that had always been the case, but for months I just assumed that it was the internet activity, and not Firefox itself.  But even after the registry and graphics fixes, the pattern just became that much more clear.

Just today, it struck me; for the second time in a week, Firefox was running like a tricycle on mud road, taking a good 20 minutes to open pages.  In good faith, I assumed that we were having internet problems.  (Even this morning, I still readily and undoubtingly blamed Bell Canada without even considering Firefox.) Then my wife sent me a message over Skype. She was upstairs in the same house on the same internet connection.  No problems. (With crawling twin babies, and two other young children, it's easier than trying to come downstairs in person.)  I opened Internet Explorer to finish something off before restarting.  No problem.  Could it really be?

The Big Move

Quickly coming to the (shocking, life-changing, devastating yet fully liberating) realization that it was becoming increasingly apparent that Firefox was probably the main culprit all along, and still disliking Internet Explorer, I quickly downloaded and installed Chrome, hoping to retrieve some work that had been unsaved when Firefox starting "spinning its tires."  No luck.  Firefox had cost me an hour of work this morning. (Yes, I know, you're supposed to save every few minutes but in this case it was clearly the case of Firefox.)  And how many hours of frustration and searching the internet for improvements to make Windows 7 faster had Firefox already caused me?

I did a few blog posts on Chrome, downloading and uploading pictures, everything moving rapid and easily, while Firefox was still chugging away in the background.  So, I knowing the drastic measure I had to take, I opened the task manager and forced Firefox to close.  I authorized Chrome to transfer the settings from Firefox, and - here it is - for the first time (in nearly a decade?) I uninstalled Firefox with the intention of doing so permanently.

Is This the End?

Earlier in the evening I briefly considered changing the description of this blog to say:

"... an expat writes of his escape to Mexico and then back to Canada, a spiritual journey, a change in web browser and many discoveries in unexpected places in life."

 But the emotional pain is still to deep.

Firefox has let me down.

But so far, with 6 hours of using Chrome, all is well, not a single slow down or even delay or glitch.  In the past few months, this is a record.

(And just so you know that I'm not all that emotional about all of this, here's a good laugh:)