Monday, December 19, 2011

Shifting to Chrome

Well, the shift to Google Chrome as my default browser seems to be going okay.   Of course some things went missing with the change - not my bookmarks, which were happily imported from Firefox - though truth to tell, I hardly ever use the bookmarks now, as typing into the URL line usually brings up anything I want.

I did lose the add-ons I had - Chrome calls them extensions - and had to go and re-sort them: Evernote's clipper, for one, and RoboForm (which oddly turns up at the bottom of the screen rather than the top; some curious feature of Chrome, apparently).   Zotero also went missing - it's part of Firefox's add-ons, but not Chrome's as far as I can tell.  You can get Zotero as a stand-alone programme now, but I haven't yet figured out how to get stuff into the right folder in the stand-alone version: when you click on the little blue box that records the book item you're interested in, it just pops it in wherever it feels like it, and because of Zotero's set-up, you can't find which folder it's in, although of course you can actually find the item through their search box.

And just now I realised I didn't have the add-on that copied URLs to Twitter (or other social media).   Chrome has an extension for this, so that wasn't too much of a problem.

The main reason I shifted was because Facebook was becoming very sticky on Firefox.   (My geek son reckons Firefox has overloaded itself with all its upgrades).   Anyway, on Chrome, Facebook is behaving itself very well, so that's a plus.  Another plus is that there's no separate box for doing a Google search: the URL box and the search box are one and the same (this being Google's browser, naturally) so that's actually a gain.  This was starting to happen on Firefox, but not quite so effectively.

So, at present, all good.

PS 20.12.2011 Only realised this morning that Evernote is not working in quite the same way it used to.  Instead of clipping whatever it is that you want clipped directly to the Evernote database on your computer, it clips it now to your Evernote database online.  It's only when you sync the two that the computer version updates.  Before it was the other way round.  Odd.  On the plus side, the new look Evernote clipper is an improvement over the old one.  And doesn't require as much fiddling around with each time.

And another thing: everything is being spellchecked all over again (like the word, spellchecked, for instance).  Obviously Chrome doesn't import all the words I've collected over the last few years of Firefox usage.

2 comments:

Ryan said...

Good move I think. Firefox is an important and influential browser but yes can be weighty when using on a day to day basis. I am mightily impressed with all of your add-ons (now extensions!).

Mike Crowl said...

Thanks, Ryan! And have a great Christmas if I'm not in touch in the next few days...thanks for your help during the year, too.