Well, I’ve decided to make the move. I have switched from Firefox to Google Chrome. I’ve always had Chrome on my system, as someone who does websites, you have several. On my system, I have IE, Chrome, Opera, Firefox, & Safari. In years gone by, that was a requirement, as you needed to check how your sites looked in different browsers. Going into 2012, that’s less of an issue. For the most part they don’t have the egregiously different displays that they used to. Still, old habits die hard.

Recently, I’ve started having slowdown problems with Firefox. It was’t awful, but I was still dealing with some long standing issues hanging around the browser for awhile. Sometimes it would just stall out, and when you quit, it’s still running in the background, things of that nature. Nothing of the order where I had to stop browsing because of it, but enough little annoyces, that they built up over time.

Then yesterday, I saw an article where Google might be pulling funding for Firefox down the line. It’s all speculative, and I’m not foolish enough to think that Firefox will up and disappear at all, but that article got me thinking. I’ve had a lot of little nit picky issues with Firefox. Not any one enough to make me want to change software, but put ’em all together, and it got me wondering if I should look at Chrome again.

So yesterday I decided to take another look at Chrome. I initially decided not to use it, because there were several plugins I had which there was no comparison for in Chrome. If I switched awhile ago, Chrome would cramp my style a bunch insofar as my browsing goes. So I stayed with Firefox, which wasn’t a bad thing.

I noticed the importer for Chrome does a great job at importing not just the bookmarks, but the login sessions and passwords and other info from Firefox. It was pretty quick. Granted, I had to fiddle with the bookmarks a bit to get them to come up the way I wanted them to, but they were all there. My online travels today were in Chrome. Didn’t go to Firefox today except when I was researching plugins. It was stupid faster than Firefox was. Loaded faster, ran faster, displayed faster. I knew it was a fast browser, but I never really sat down and delved into it like that. Was impressed.

The overall “look” to the browser isn’t that terrible dissimilar to Firefox. A few FF revisions ago, they went minimalistic like Chrome has been for awhile, so it’s not a complete shock to go to Chrome.

So I started looking into plugins, which was the big deal for me. Jotted down all the Firefox plugins I was using. There were a handful that were specific to Firefox, and were not relevant. Went down my list of plugins, and found there were 10 I was actively using in Firefox, so I wanted to see what was out there for Chrome. First choice is a Chrome version by the same developer. After that, something similar. I’ll get into my specific plugin choices later, but suffice it to say with one exception I found something I could use.

Given I was leaning towards Chrome anyway, I decided to make the jump when I had such a good rate of coverage on the plugins. That’s where I am now. I’ve changed from Firefox to Chrome mostly because of speed issues. I’ve got my battery of plugins up and running, except for one. I’ll address that in my plugins story below.

Unlike some people who make these kind of moves, I’m not gonna trash Firefox, and claim it sucks, because it doesn’t. Served me well for quite a long time. Just found that for me and my feelings towards a web browser, Chrome works better. There you go.

Here’s my plugins I was using in Firefox, and what I did with ’em.

1. Adblock Plus -> Essential plugin. They make a Chrome version, so that was stupid easy to bring over.
2. Add to Amazon Wish List Button -> I use Amazon’s Wishlists a lot, and you can add just about anything to one. Amazon makes a Chrome version, so I just installed that.
3. Web Developer -> This is a plugin that I’ve used for awhile. Shows you a lot of fiddly low level CSS/HTML stuff about web pages. They make a Chrome version, so I installed it. It visually looks a lot nicer than the Firefox version, too. Also, Chrome itself has a lot of built in tools for this kind of thing, but I’m used to Web Developer, so I installed it.
4. Google’s Advertising Cookie Opt-Out -> Google made an official plugin which let you permanently opt out of some of the doubleclick advertising cookies. I was using that. Looked around, and they have a Chrome one too, so I installed that.
5. Easy Youtube Downloader -> They don’t have a specific Chrome replacement, but someone else had one that did the same thing, so I installed that. Don’t use it often, but when I do want it, it’s nice to have.
6. Echofon -> It’s my twitter plugin. This is the one thing that I’ve yet to find a good replacement for. I poked around at a few Twitter plugins for Chrome, and I don’t like any of them. I prefer Echofon, so I opted to install their Windows specific client. Looks the same way as the Firefox plugin, but I’d prefer a Chrome plugin.
7. FEBE -> This was a plugin for Firefox that backed up your entire profile. Bookmarks, config, plugins, everything. Chrome does this for you (save for plugins), so it was not necessary in Chrome.
8. Garmin Communicator -> I have a Garmin GPS, and it gets new maps and updates via a browser plugin through their site. That same plugin works in both Firefox and Chrome, so I didn’t have to do anything, it just used the existing stuff on my computer. That was cool.
9. Paste Email Plus -> This was an app that let you paste existing snippets of text into any text box in a browser that your cursor is at. With the work I do (both pro & hobby), you type things over and over again alot. These guys don’t make a Chrome verison of their plugin, so I had to go find a replacement that does the same thing. I did, it’s called “Insert Text”.
10. Rapportive -> Gives you some extra info about the person whose email you are reading in Gmail. Had it installed in Firefox, and didn’t use it too much, so I just left it out in Chrome, even though they do make a Chrome version.

That’s it!