“If it’s not bro­ken, don’t fix it.”  That has been my rea­son for being a long term Inter­net Explorer user until.  Many peo­ple con­sider IE being incred­i­bly easy to exploit, which led to a “if you ain’t using Fire­fox, you ain’t cool” move­ment a few years back.  FF fans rave how much more cus­tomiza­tion their browser has, and how much “safer” than IE, blah blah.  The argu­ment was not con­vinc­ing enough for me to switch over.  Partly because Microsoft’s browser is still way more acces­si­ble, in both vir­tual and real world.  A few web­sites I used to fre­quent was noto­ri­ous enough to have con­tent avail­able only to IE core; and of course, places like libraries more than likely to have IE than FF.

That was few years ago, and now things changed.  Up to a point I was not happy about IE8’s per­for­mance, and Fire­fox 5.0 came out under a new skin that looks sus­pi­ciously sim­i­lar to Google Chrome.  I didn’t like Chrome too well because the browser is still in beta, and it was lack of refine­ment under its slicker appearance.

So I witched to use Fire­fox up until now.  I’d say it was a nice change of mood, start by the browser’s bet­ter lay­out than IE, which resulted larger view space.  The way I use browser is basi­cally never close any tab/window on sites like forums, wiki, etc until the browser crash, com­puter crash, or a reboot in fear of the pre­vi­ous two.  FF did not give me a big per­for­mance boost, and it does its own fair amount of crash­ing from time to time.

Amus­ingly enough, Yahoo tool­bar is a med­i­tat­ing force that really made care less about which browser I’m using as long as I get my reg­u­lar short­cuts and most impor­tantly, the list of book­marks that I can access on all machines which browser has the tool­bar installed.  It also has been use­ful in pub­lic loca­tions even with­out the tool­bar, where I would be check­ing my Yahoo mail (has been a paid user for years), and get­ting the list of book­marks is sim­ply open­ing up a new tab and type bookmarks.yahoo.com.

Now it has to come an end.  I don’t care what Yahoo does with Deli­cious as I never used Deli­cious before, but dis­al­low­ing users to add new book­marks for three months is an insult to users espe­cially with the given rea­son being a “main­te­nance”.  Obvi­ously, it has to be much more than a main­te­nance, and hon­estly I won’t really care to find out.  Yahoo gets what it wants, which is my case not only one less user to its book­mark ser­vice, but also as a paid cus­tomer of Yahoo Mail Plus.

Another rea­son I’m ditch­ing Yahoo Mail is because the Android phone I’m using… has much bet­ter inte­gra­tion with Gmail, with­out any sur­prises.  A grain of salt is awarded to Yahoo, again, for its slow and buggy mail app on Android.

I orig­i­nally though switch­ing to Google Chrome browser will be a solu­tion to keep­ing all my book­marks some­where in a cloud and for eas­ier access wher­ever I go.  I was dis­ap­pointed Google failed mis­er­ably to imple­ment its book­mark ser­vice in despite Yahoo Book­marks have existed since the ancient times.  First of all, Google Book­marks has no con­nec­tion to the book­marks sync’d through Chrome.  The stu­pid­est of all is the fact that even if I accept Google Bookmark’s hor­rid tag sys­tem instead of a lay­ered direc­tory sys­tem, there is no way to install Google Tool­bar on either Fire­fox 6 or Chrome.  And even assume Chrome intel­li­gently imple­mented its sync fea­ture (which it cur­rently does not), hav­ing no html access to those book­marks is rather unappealing–let’s face it, Chrome isn’t as pop­u­lar as IE and FF, and most library and lab machines don’t tend to have Chrome installed.

 

Any­way, it was get­ting less sen­si­ble as I dig into it so I decided to stop and look for a third-party solu­tion.  Appar­ently Xmarks offers a clas­sic yet work­ing approach to book­mark syn­chro­niz­ing and it is avail­able as a plug-in to both Fire­fox and Chrome.  Xmarks does exactly what is expected it to do: it sync cur­rent browser’s book­marks to its server.  I can either access the book­marks by log­ging in via browser exten­sion,  or sim­ply access them on a webpage.

Such is a dan­ger­ous depen­dency on an estab­lished habit.  At least I found a com­pa­ra­ble sub­sti­tu­tion to Yahoo book­marks, but it does not answer the big­ger ques­tion: Should I keep using FF or should I switch to Chrome.  I guess cur­rently FF is look­ing bet­ter because as I am writ­ing this entry using Chrome, the browser went into a into some sort of script loop and semi-crashed.

War of attri­tion, it seems.