Experiment: Leaving Chrome for Planet Firefox, Pt. 1

I always like those tech series where a writer does something brave: Use nothing but Chrome OS for a week or (gasp!) Ubuntu for a month.

As much as I like these pieces, I’m not all that crazy about putting myself through social experiments. I’ve already tried living in Fedora and I don’t last much longer than a week. I didn’t last more than 10 minutes in Windows 8.

I don’t get to fidget with OSes and new gadgets for a living. It’s strictly a spare time gig. So I’m biting off something a little less stressful. I’m going to shelf Chrome and run nothing but Firefox and see how long I can last.

What’s the big deal? The big deal is this: I spend a lot of time online. I run a weekly paper and am responsible for the daily content management of its website. I stick to webmail over clients and organize my life around Google services. I live in the browser.

Chrome has made life on the web really easy. And it’s sync functions are remarkable. I find no greater satisfaction on a fresh install of Ubuntu than the instant repopulation of all my web apps, bookmarks and extensions on a synced Chrome. Not only that, but I’m an Android user and Chrome on my Nexus 7 tab is pretty great. Maybe the best mobile browser ever.

So why leave all that awesomeness behind? Besides the fact that I think a big browser swap an interesting thing to try, I’ve always really wanted to like Firefox more. Before Chrome, it was my browser. And there’s not much to dislike about Mozilla. It’s about as great an open source company as there is. Maybe I’ll find life in Firefox has its advantages. We’ll see… Maybe if it goes well, get really crazy and move everything to Opera.

So I’m moving my setup to Firefox. I’m going to set up sync across three computers an android tablet and a phone and see how it compares. I’m going to set up my extensions, add ons and move all my work – from WordPress to Hootsuite and more – to Firefox.

I’ll report back on how it goes in future posts next week.