Why I Finally Ditched Firefox After Years of Loyalty

Have you ever realized how easy it is to fall into a tech rut? We stick with what’s familiar, whether it’s the same brand of cereal or the same make of car. For me, that rut has been Mozilla Firefox. I’ve used it for what feels like forever. Honestly, I can’t even remember when I started, but it has been my go-to browser across Windows, Mac, and my phone. Back then, Firefox felt fast, feature rich, and easy to use. Plus, it offered something I really wanted: the ability to sync bookmarks between my iPhone and Windows. That was a game changer at the time. Of course, now every modern browser does that, syncing bookmarks, autofill, and passwords so you can pick up where you left off on any device.

But last week, things changed. Firefox started driving me crazy. Pages were slow, the spinning wheel was constant, and overall performance just wasn’t great. This wasn’t just on one computer, it was happening on both my work and home machines. So, I decided to do something radical for me: give Google Chrome a full day test drive.

At first, I only installed Chrome on my work computer. Sure, I’ve used Chrome, Edge, Safari, and others over the years, but never as my primary browser for an entire day. This time, I committed. And wow, within the first hour, the difference was obvious. Pages loaded faster. Everything felt snappier. Out of curiosity, I tried Safari for an hour too. It was also faster than Firefox, but Chrome still felt like the winner. Then I gave Microsoft Edge a quick spin and again, super fast. No surprise there, Edge and Chrome share the same Chromium engine.

Here’s the thing: I’ve always had multiple browsers installed for testing, but I never thought about switching permanently. After this experience though, I officially moved to Chrome on all my devices. There’s a small learning curve, figuring out where settings live and getting used to tab behavior, but overall, I’m impressed. Websites load noticeably faster, and the whole experience feels smoother.

Thinking back, it’s funny how far browsers have come. I remember using Netscape Navigator way back in the day. Mosaic too, in the early 1990s. Netscape launched in 1994, and I stuck with it for years. Then came Internet Explorer. I used IE for a long time, mostly because some sites wouldn’t work on anything else. Eventually, I switched to Firefox, and now here I am, making the leap to Chrome. Will I stay here forever? Probably not. Tech moves fast, and I like to keep an open mind.

So, what about you? What browser do you use and why? Do you stick with one across all your devices or mix and match?

This might not be the most thrilling topic, but it’s part of my tech journey, and I wanted to share it. Until next time, have a great Sunday and an amazing week ahead!

Continuing to Use Safari App on iPhone for FaceBook Access and Still Working Great!

It has now been three weeks since the change from no longer having a FaceBook app installed on my phone (see previous post: Switching from FaceBook App to Web Site Only). After three weeks, I am still loving the change. Now, I have not noticed a huge change in battery levels for the phone where it lasts all day or even an extra 15-20% of the day, but it has improved how I use the phone for FaceBook activity. The change has allowed the ability to be more connected with FaceBook contacts and not feel as tethered to my phone each time the alert went off with a notification.

Notifications

The first thing I did a few days after going to no app on the phone was to enable email notifications for various events on FaceBook. I still wanted to know when an event happened, but not necessarily receive it on the phone as a notification. Instead, I wanted to change it so that those notices would come through via email instead. Making this change to a no-app phone allowed me to control which notifications (via email) I see and how I interact with those notifications.

The other improvement by making this change has been notifications through the web site via the phone. When a lot of notifications would be received on the app, the FaceBook app would display all notifications including those that had already been viewed. It would take a while to scroll through the list and look at each notification. With the web access, this is no longer a problem. It only displays those events which have not been viewed.  Thus, if there are ten notifications, only those ten are displayed making it very easy to see each notice. I have had has many as twenty-five notifications since changing to this method and even with as many as 25 notifications, it was very easy to get through the entire list.

This is an improvement if you ask me as it is event difficult to see which notifications have been checked access FaceBook on a computer. Any notification is displayed and scrolling has to be done to get through the list sometimes and difficult to see which ones have been read or not. Possibly a setting that can be changed, but nothing I ever found to make notifications work better in the app and only display those that had not been viewed.

Future Use

For now, I plan on continuing to use this method to access FaceBook. It is easy and not always reaching for my phone each time the alert goes off for FaceBook. Looking at notifications, I do see much higher notifications since going go this approach. It could be argued that is where the 15-20% battery increase comes in that now instead of reaching for the phone each time the alert goes off, I am now only reaching for the phone when there are many alerts. Or, by knowing what the alert is by reading it in email so I do not have to check each one as I would with the regular alerts.

What Has Been Your Experience 

Have you done this switch? What have you experienced since making the change and removing the app? Share your experience in the comments or why you switched back to the app.