{"id":1424,"date":"2011-11-04T10:02:58","date_gmt":"2011-11-03T23:02:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/?p=1424"},"modified":"2011-11-05T13:32:11","modified_gmt":"2011-11-05T02:32:11","slug":"converting-a-chrome-user-to-firefox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/2011\/11\/04\/converting-a-chrome-user-to-firefox\/","title":{"rendered":"Converting a Chrome user to Firefox"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Update: before commenting, you should probably read this follow-up post<\/a> that clarifies certain things about this post.]<\/strong><\/p>\n

On my recent vacation I was staying with a family member, let’s call her Karen (not her real name).\u00a0 She was a Google Chrome user, and I managed to convert her to a satisfied Firefox user.\u00a0 Here’s what I learnt along the way.<\/p>\n

tl;dr:<\/h3>\n

Bad things about the experience:<\/p>\n

    \n
  • The third-party add-ons situation on Windows is awful.<\/li>\n
  • We need a “import history from Chrome” feature.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    Good things about the experience:<\/p>\n

      \n
    • Mozilla’s non-profit nature is compelling, if you know about it.<\/li>\n
    • AdBlock Plus is great.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

      The Initial Situation<\/h3>\n

      Karen is a moderately sophisticated computer user. She knows what a browser is, but didn’t know how many there were, who made them, or any notable differences between them.<\/p>\n

      Her machine that is probably 2 or 3 years old, and runs Windows Vista.\u00a0 She had used IE in the past (not sure which version) but didn’t like it, switched to Chrome at some point — she didn’t remember how or why — and found it to be much better.\u00a0 She was running Chrome 14.0.835.202 (no, that’s not an IP address!) which was the latest stable version.<\/p>\n

      She also had Firefox 3.6.17 installed, but judging from the profile she hadn’t used it much — there was very little history.\u00a0 She had the following Firefox add-ons installed:<\/p>\n

        \n
      • Java Console 6.0.20 and 6.0.27.<\/li>\n
      • The .NET Framework Assistant.<\/li>\n
      • Some media player thing.<\/li>\n
      • Some Norton “safe search” toolbar, and Symantec IPS, whatever that is.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

        (What is the Java Console?\u00a0 What is the .NET Framework Assistant?\u00a0 As far as I can tell they are (a) very common and (b) useless.)<\/p>\n

        I told her that I worked on Firefox and suggested that she try it and she was open to the idea.\u00a0 I talked about the differences between Firefox and Chrome and some of my work on Firefox.\u00a0 The thing that caught her attention most was that Mozilla is a non-profit organization.\u00a0 She hadn’t known this and it appealed to her greatly — she said that browser speed and the non-profit nature were the two most important things to her.\u00a0 She was also somewhat interested when I said that Firefox had an ad-blocking add-on.\u00a0 At the end of the conversation, she agreed to let me install Firefox and make it the default browser.<\/p>\n

        Installing Firefox<\/h3>\n

        I removed the existing Firefox profile manually — I wasn’t sure if this was necessary, but I definitely wanted a fresh profile — and then uninstalled Firefox through the Control Panel.\u00a0 I then installed Firefox 7.0.1.\u00a0 (BTW, I stayed with Karen for two weeks at this point, and I had deliberately waited until Firefox 7 was out before doing this because I knew it had much lower memory usage than Firefox 6.)<\/p>\n

        An unexpected thing was that the Firefox installer asked me to close all the other running programs;\u00a0 it explained that this would mean that I wouldn’t have to reboot.\u00a0 I’m used to running Firefox on Mac and Linux so I’m not used to this, but I’m familiar enough with Windows that I wasn’t totally surprised.\u00a0 Still, it was annoying;\u00a0 Karen had MS Word and some other programs open and I had to go ask her if I needed to save anything before closing them.\u00a0 I realize this is Windows’ fault, not Firefox’s, but it was an obstacle.<\/p>\n

        Starting Firefox<\/h3>\n

        When I started Firefox it asked me if I wanted to make it the default browser and I said yes.\u00a0 (I explained to Karen how to switch the default browser back to Chrome if she was unhappy with Firefox.)<\/p>\n

        It also asked me if I wanted to import history\/bookmarks\/etc from IE.\u00a0 But there was no equivalent for Chrome!\u00a0 Karen had a ton of bookmarks in Chrome, but fortunately she said she only used a handful of them so I was able to copy them manually into Firefox’s bookmarks toolbar (which I had to make visible).\u00a0 I’ve heard that someone is working on an “import from Chrome”\u00a0 feature to Firefox but I don’t know what the status is.\u00a0 We need it badly.<\/p>\n

        Once Firefox started, another unexpected thing was the state of the add-ons in the new profile.\u00a0 The Symantec add-ons (including the ugly Norton toolbar) were present and enabled.\u00a0 I had to disable them in about:addons;\u00a0 I wanted to completely uninstall them but I couldn’t, the “uninstall” button just wasn’t present.\u00a0 The Java Consoles and the media player were disabled because they were incompatible with 7.0.1, but I was also not able to\u00a0 uninstall them.\u00a0 This horrified me.\u00a0 Is it a Windows-only behaviour?\u00a0 Whatever the explanation, the default situation in a fresh install was that Firefox had several unnecessary, ugly additions, and it took some effort to remove them.\u00a0 I’m really hoping that the add-on confirmation screen that has been added to Firefox 8 will help improve this situation, because this was the single worst part of the process.<\/p>\n

        I then tweaked the location of the home and reload buttons so they were in exactly the same position as in Chrome.\u00a0 I probably didn’t need to do that, but\u00a0 with those changes made Firefox’s UI looked very similar to Chrome’s, and I wanted things to be as comfortable for her as possible.<\/p>\n

        The best part of the process was when I installed AdBlock Plus.\u00a0 With Karen watching, I visited nytimes.com in Chrome, and I had to skip past a video advertisement before even getting to the front page, and then the front page had heaps of ads.\u00a0 Then I visited in Firefox — no video, no ads.\u00a0 It was great!<\/p>\n

        Follow-up<\/h3>\n

        A week or two later I sent Karen a follow-up email to check that everything was ok.\u00a0 She said “All is well! The ad blocking is a great feature.”<\/p>\n

        So, Firefox has a new and happy user, but there were some obstacles along the way, and the outcome probably wouldn’t have been so good if Karen hadn’t had a Firefox expert to help her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

        [Update: before commenting, you should probably read this follow-up post that clarifies certain things about this post.] On my recent vacation I was staying with a family member, let’s call her Karen (not her real name).\u00a0 She was a Google Chrome user, and I managed to convert her to a satisfied Firefox user.\u00a0 Here’s what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4559,30,4558,118],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/139"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}