So I’ve bit the bullet and switched over to Firefox from Safari. While I’m still not 100% (Firefox still has my “work” bookmarks, but I think I’ll be switching over to del.icio.us as my bookmarking repository.
What finally did it for me was the discovery that the Google plugin will autofill my form fields. This was the one feature that Safari had over Firefox, aside from Keychain integration, which isn’t so important to me. I buy a lot of stuff online, and having to type my address constantly would suck.
What does Firefox have that Safari doesn’t? Well, it’s got extensions that’ll do just about everything. They’ll increase the load on my computer, but if I never leave the browser, it doesn’t really matter that much. For example, I can run a blog editor, an RSS reader, and a browser all at the same time. That beats having Vienna, TextMate and Safari open to do the same things.
But what made me trust Google enough to put them in my web browser? Well, this interview with Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, did it for me. He talks about how Google stood up to the federal government when they wanted them to release their search index and a week’s worth of queries to do data mining. Google didn’t do it, not only because it wasn’t right, but also because Google doesn’t want to do anything to piss off their customers. (My words, not his.) They seem to “get” what a lot of companies don’t. They want to make it easy for people to move between their system and another. That kind of respect for my data is very much appreciated.
So I switched from iCal to Google Calendars. I switched from the open source RSS reader Vienna to Google’s Reader. I’m also thinking about switching from Apple’s Mail.app to Gmail, which can be accomplished fairly easily using a nifty little trick I learned at the Dreamhost wiki. I made the switch from Mail.app to Gmail, and I haven’t looked back. All my email still appears to be sent to and received from my hosted email address, but I’m using the Gmail interface. Thanks to Google’s massive storage, 2,792 MB as of right now, I’m not too worried about getting swamped with email.
Now if they only offered TV Listings…
