I might be late to this but it's something I discovered recently.
Let's take a fictional character and call them Joe Bloggs. Joe doesn't subscribe to all that fancy schmancy internet nonsense and has no clue what a 'Facespace' or a 'MyBook' is. He checks his email every now and then and might browse the web from time to time, but that's all he really does on the internet.
So imagine his surprise when he gets an email from some Facebook thing telling him he should sign up, because all his friends are on it. He'd dismiss it, only - it really is listing all his friends. How can Facebook know who his friends are? How does it know that Jane Bloggs is his sister and John Bloggs is his father? How does it know so much about him when he knows nothing about it?
The answer is that Facebook collects emails and search habits. You know that 'enter your email details to search your contact list for friends on Facebook' feature? Be careful with it. Facebook keeps all the addresses it finds and associates them with you. If you've got those email addresses in your contact list, they must be your friend, right? Repeat this for all the other members on Facebook who are doing the same thing and Facebook can build up a pretty good picture of who you are.
Facebook also allows you to list various family members on your profile, and if said member doesn't have a Facebook profile, it asks for their email address. Facebook then knows when someone invites you to Facebook that you're the brother of X and the father of Y and whatever else.
Facebook's privacy has come under fire recently and I'm not surprised - I admit to using the email search feature when I first joined Facebook and nowhere do I remember it saying it would collect all my contacts' email addresses and retain them in order to guilt-trip other people into joining. I had another look at it recently (without actually entering my details, of course) and I still didn't see it. Admittedly, I have not read their very long and very complicated privacy policy in some time so it is likely to be mentioned there.
Am I going to delete my Facebook profile after this? I'm not sure. It is a great way to keep in contact with people I haven't spoken to in years but if it's profiling me behind my back, I'm not sure I agree with that. Facebook are by far not the first or only company to do this, of course, but they are so far the most high-profile and media attention-worthy. With millions and millions of members, they can make some hefty $$$ from all this if they really wanted to (and there are rumours that they do want to. Imagine what advertisers could do with that data!). Then again, if I did delete my profile, Facebook never really deletes a profile in case you want to reactivate it. So they've got my info anyway, whether I gave it to them or not, and whether I want it there or not. Fun.
Scary stuff, if you ask me.
I seem to find myself in somewhat of a minority these days; whether that is true or just how it feels I don't know, but it looks like a lot of the 'crowd' are switching to Google's browser, Chrome, while I'm lagging behind with Firefox.
I feel a bit like I did back in 2004 when Firefox first came out (and was called Firebird). I swore I'd never leave IE6 - I was happy with it, it did everything I wanted and I didn't want to change my ways just because someone said somewhere that IE might be rubbish. Of course, I was convinced eventually - the main deciding factor was the tabbed browsing and the fact that I could open all my daily bookmarks just by middle-clicking a folder or selecting "open all in tabs". After switching I discovered just what a headache IE was and how stupid I had been to be so in love with it :P
So am I just in denial again this time and standing by Firefox because I am too stubborn to switch to the new cool kid in town? I don't think so, this time. Don't get me wrong, Chrome is a great browser - I have it and use it every now and then.
Things I like about Chrome:
Speed
You can't deny that Chrome is very fast, and Firefox's increasing bloat is really noticeable next to it. Chrome starts immediately on my PC whereas Firefox takes about 30-40 seconds. It takes a bit longer on the Mac but it's still faster than Firefox which again takes around 30 seconds to start. Both computers are of a similar spec and age, just in case you were wondering.
The other speed factor is the more up-to-date JavaScript engine included in WebKit (the rendering engine Chrome is based on) - AJAX queries are much faster in Chrome than they are in Firefox which is useful for JS-heavy websites.
Resource usage
Firefox is pretty heavy on the resource front. Right now I have 4 tabs open and Firefox is using a whopping 169MB of memory to run them. Opening the same 4 tabs in Chrome only takes up 91MB. Of course, the reasoning behind this may be simple - I've got far more extensions running in Firefox than I have in Chrome (I do have some in Chrome though, so it's not an out-of-the-box copy). However, I'm inclined to believe this isn't just to do with the extensions since I've heard of lots of people with no extensions having issues with stupid memory usage courtesy of Firefox.
When I shut down Firefox, it takes aaaaages. I know it does things like backing up my bookmarks and saving my open tabs and sessions and whatever else, but so does Chrome and Chrome shuts down immediately. On the Mac I've also had odd issues with Firefox continually reopening itself whenever I shut it down as well... Never had that with Chrome.
Themes
Firefox has a great many themes available for it, and I've never really been a fan of the default so have always used one or another. They're ok, but they are a bit flakey in places - the theme I'm using at the moment doesn't theme dialogue boxes correctly so they look all squashed. It's not the first time I've experienced that either - perhaps just lazy theme makers.
Firefox has recently introduced the concept of Personas - simple themes that plonk themselves on top of the default to give your browser a bit of a facelift. Easy to install and no restart needed (except for the installation of the original extension). Except... to use them, you need to be using the default theme, which as I said before, I'm not a fan of. Therefore, any persona looks horrible to me because it's on top of the icky default theme. I don't mind so much on the Mac which has a different default theme - in fact, I'm using Personas on my Mac copy of FF - but on Windows and Linux I don't think they really work with the default theme. Sorry Firefox. Chrome's themes are more like the Personas - they don't change much except add a background here and there and maybe change some colours, but some of them are really well made and I found a theme I fell in love with immediately. It really makes me want to use Chrome more since I really do like it. Not seeing anything similar for Firefox and even if I did, I don't think it would work too well since it seems centred on the way Chrome is actually laid out.
Little things
There are little things that annoy me about Firefox. The most annoying is when it randomly decides it won't load a page, even if I was just on it a moment ago. I have to go and empty the cache before it'll load again. Sometimes I just give up and open Chrome to view the page rather than fiddling about with caches :P I even tried reinstalling Firefox and removing my profile data to see if that helped - it didn't.
Restarting to install extensions and themes really annoys me too. I know why I have to (it's the way FF works) but Chrome manages its extensions just fine without a restart and I can install a bunch of them and see how they work without having to wait ages (see point 1 above) for my browser to restart.
There are other little niggles about Firefox that annoy me too - sometimes your bookmarks will all disappear; it'll crash and won't let you reopen it, claiming it's still running; it does weird stuff with saved usernames/passwords, capitalising parts it shouldn't... There's more, but if I can't think of them right now then they can't be that important.
Having said that though, there is one BIG reason why I will not be switching to Chrome, despite all the above - extensions. I use around 30 extensions at the moment and I find every one of them useful. Some of them are silly things like showing me the weather forecast or generating Lipsum, but others I could not live without (well, slight exaggeration. Maybe). Adblock Plus, NoScript and HTML Validator are just some of the extensions I use on a daily basis and which Chrome hasn't managed yet. Yes, it does have an Adblock extension and some sort of port of the others, but they just aren't as good. The fact that Chrome has no status bar means most of the extensions that have icons are bunched up into the toolbar, making my address bar smaller. I installed a few Chrome extensions and they all went into my toolbar - all 6 of them - and it makes it look cluttered and busy. In Firefox, most of the extensions sit nicely in the corner of the status bar which makes them non-intrusive and I can look at them quickly if I want to see their status or change an option.
There is a lot of community support for Chrome, but it isn't at all what Firefox has. Perhaps because Firefox has been around for about 6 years longer than Chrome - in 6 years we might have the same, if not more, community support for Chrome than Firefox, but it isn't the case now. You can Google anything to do with Firefox and find a way to do it - if you can't tweak about:config or find an extension for it, I'd be very surprised.
While I would love to use Chrome if it had the extensions I love from Firefox, I doubt they will implement a similar engine. Chrome is not Firefox and by making these extensions work with Chrome, will they not just be producing a clone (or 'lite' version) of Firefox? I would have thought that Google would want Chrome to be its own browser and not just a faster version of something already out there. Also, Google is unlikely to change its support for an Adblock or NoScript plugin since its own ads would be blocked by such things... Not a good idea for them.
There is also some rumour that Google collect everything you do on Chrome and use it to target ads at you or something (not read up on the details, I must admit). Not keen on that but it wouldn't deter me from switching if the extensions were better.
In short, I like Chrome... but I won't be switching. I'm happy to stay with my slow and bloated Firefox that has the extensions I know and love. Maybe I'll change my mind at some point, but not yet.
If you remember, I have had a few problems with BT, the UK's main provider of landlines. We were stuck with a 12 month contract after we moved house, and they charged us £200 to reconnect a line that was already there (but disconnected. Oh really, is that why we could make and receive calls? ... Unfortunately they had just amended their terms and conditions to say they could do such a thing, so we didn't have much of a choice but to pay) and we had internet on the same account because of a prior agreement with the landlord of our old house. All of this was in said landlord's name, and they refused to change the name on the account, saying that we were mid-contract and were not allowed to change anything. Pffft.
Anyway, fast forward to August, when I was shopping around for more decent ISPs. Our 12 month contract had been up in June but we hadn't had time to go and find a new provider as yet. Having found a new one - Plusnet, if you're interested - we called BT to tell them to cancel our internet. They did everything they could to try and keep us, promising that they would lower the price to the same rate as Plusnet and blah blah blah. NOT THE POINT. The fact is, you messed us around so much last year that I am not prepared to give you any more money.
We decided to keep the landline with BT for now, as we weren't sure if we could get a better deal elsewhere, but when the bill came - still in our old landlord's name - we decided to complain, again. They wanted us to agree to a 12 month contract if we changed the name on the account. I'm sorry, what? Since when do I have to agree to a further 12 months of staying with you because YOU refused to change the name in the first place? No, I don't think so. We switched to Plusnet for our landline as well, and couldn't be happier.
That means we are completely free from BT, FINALLY. Good riddance, I say. Don't let the door hit you on the way out and all that.
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