I’m switching today. Right now. Because of this post.
^^maybe
EDIT: okay. I think I’ve done it. I’m currently editing this comment from Firefox. I already had Firefox installed. But now I have pinned it to my taskbar. I went to import my bookmarks from chrome, and found that I also had the option of importing other stuff from chrome, too (bookmarks, passwords, history and autofill data). That’s sweet. My bookmark bar has the same bookmarks in the same position. I also installed ublock origin, like someone recommended. And I am going to give it a go. If it all goes smoothly, I will unpin Chrome from the taskbar.
Thanks everyone for the encouragement!
And in fact will save you CPU cycles. For a bit, Chrome had a slight performance edge over Firefox. But once Google got the market share, Firefox caught up and got ahead, and Chrome didn’t invest in keeping up, so Firefox is generally faster. The only exception is a few sites (especially Google ones) seem to be heavily optimised for Chrome, but not necessarily as much for Firefox. If you stay away from those sites, Firefox is generally faster.
Plus Chromium is increasingly becoming more hostile to efficient ad blocking add-on implementations - so if you want to block ads (generally recommended due to ad networks doubling as paid malware distribution networks), Firefox or other Gecko-based browsers are generally the best bet.
If it would help with the transition, Firefox has a first time install option to move over all of your bookmarks. A super cool reason to have a firefox account is the ability to transfer a tab from one device to another. Best part is that Firefox isn’t profit motivated like Chrome so there’s much less bullshit to deal with
I highly recommend putting your passwords in a paid manager. Bitwarden is awesome. I’m also testing out Protonpass which just came out. If you’re looking to move more services from google to an alternative, give Proton a look. Been running their email, calendar, and VPN and I’ve been pleased. Its still missing a few things but its improving everyday.