Firefox

Making Firefox faster (by confronting my bookmark addiction)

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.

These are a few of my favorite (browser extension) things

I use Firefox because Google sucks and I have a soft spot for the underdog, which Firefox very much is in this era of Chromium-or-bust browsers. Also, Apple doesn’t make Safari for Windows (anymore) and I’m sorry, Apple, I don’t use your devices all the time! So Firefox it is.

These are the extensions I use regularly and that I find useful. The list is a lot shorter than it used to be, as browsers began integrating a lot of features that previously required extensions.

  • Pocket. Save web stories to read later. Also converts text to a reader view, which makes the layout look nicer (and kills ads as a bonus side effect). Mozilla (makers of Firefox) owns Pocket, so it is integrated into Firefox, though it’s available for other browsers, too.
  • Font Finder (revived). I am always on the lookout for good fonts because a) I am always thinking about what will look good on my blog b) I have a fascination with fonts and typefaces and c) I’m just kind of weird in that I want to know the name of the font I’m looking at. Font Finder lets you reveal a font on a site with a simple click. You can even select a section of text and get it to render in whatever font you want, which is even more of a niche case usage that I’m looking for.
  • Dark Reader. Does its best to intelligently switch any site over to a dark mode. Handy for glaringly bright websites that don’t offer alternative views for those late night sessions. You can customize the color choices it makes, too, if you don’t like what it comes up with.
  • uBlock Origin. Yes, I block ads. Considering how they have become a vector for malware, tracking, slowing down page loading and breaking up page layout into nonsense, I feel no guilt in blocking ads. I pay for a lot of the sites I read regularly–when the option is present. It usually isn’t.
  • LanguageTool. This is the dullest name for a decent grammar and spell-checking extension ever. Similar to Grammarly, it offers to spell-check on the fly and has a nice single-click UI that please me. Like Grammarly and others, it gates some features behind a subscription, but the free version works well for me. My one complaint is it wants to insert commas everywhere.
  • OneNote Web Clipper. I don’t use OneNote that much anymore, but when I did, this extension worked well in letting you easily clip stuff for later use. Think of it as a more interactive version of Pocket.
  • NelliTab. Replacement for the New Tab page. After I found FVD speed dial started bogging down Firefox (it could take 30 seconds to start up) I sought out alternatives and the nice thing about NelliTab is it uses your bookmarks, so if you later decide to stop using NelliTab you still have your bookmarks all neatly organized into folders. The icons it uses look nice, too, and there’s a host of options for layout to help customize it just so. I may find I eventually bog this down, too, but for now it’s fine.