I have used Firefox as my primary browser on every platform for about the last hundred years. I’ve dabbled with others:
- Edge
- Chrome
- Vivaldi
- Brave
- Opera
- Safari (on the few platforms it supports)
- Arc (Mac version)
- DuckDuckGo
- Various Firefox forks, like Librewolf and the new Zen Browser
And way back in the olden times I was an Internet Explorer user. I know, I know.
I always come back to Firefox because:
- It works for me, and I’m comfortable with it.
- Mozilla is one of the few companies out there with a non-Chromium browser engine and I think it’s important to fight against having a single engine largely controlled and maintained by Google, a company I think is heading in all the wrong directions. Mozilla is also not moving in a direction I like, but lesser of evils and all that (I am keeping an eye on Zen browser, though, more on that in a future post).
- There always seems to be some feature or design quirk in the other browsers that grates on me, and somehow the things in Firefox that grate do so at a level I’m willing to tolerate.
But recently, Firefox had been getting sluggish–noticeably so. Recent updates had added browser tab previews (which other browsers have and which I enjoy, but consider non-essential). I thought this might be the culprit, so turned it off. No change. I tried clearing out the cookies and cache (the browser equivalent to turning it off and back on). Also no change.
It occurred to me that my bookmarking habit (bookmark everything) had been getting a bit out of control recently. I use a new tab extension called NelliTab. It presents your bookmarks as large icons, lets you re-order them (within their respective folder), and allows you to collapse or hide specific folders. It’s great because I’m a visual person, and it allows me to create a visual grid of bookmarks I can use with muscle memory. But as I mentioned, I have a lot of bookmarks and maybe the extension was getting bogged down.
Reluctantly, I disabled NelliTab and went back to the standard Firefox new tab page, using four rows of sites, pinning the ones I visit the most. And it worked! Firefox is now back to behaving normally.
I may eventually go back to NelliTab and see if a truncated version of the bookmarks (hiding most folders and creating a small list of most-visited ones) may solve the issue there as well. For now, I’m happy to have the browser performing smoothly again. And, you know, sometimes a little change is good, too.
Plus, it shows me the current weather conditions. I don’t need this, but I like it. I am weird.
