delicious – the irreplacable firefox addon

So I am finally using Firefox 3 and it looks like its third time lucky. Having installed it twice before, the lack of plugin support made me uninstall it very quickly, I just lost too much productivity. It has been an easy way to identify the addons that I cannot do without.

The one addon that I could not do without was delicious from Yahoo who finally released a version for Firefox 3 a few days ago. The delicious addon allows me 2 crucial things:

First I can see all my bookmarks in the browser, replacing (or co-existing with) firefox’s own bookmarks. This means that I can search delicious and go to my bookmarks without going to the delicious website and then searching. Removing that single step turned me from a rare delicious user into one that uses it almost daily.

The second is that it allows me to add sites I want to bookmark at the click of a button, in a similar way to you would normally inside a browser. Again, this saves me having to go to the delicious website and adding it there. During this step I can also share the link with my friends or choose to make the link private and not visible in my delicious profile.

There has been a huge delay to delicious rolling out the Firefox 3 addon. It has taken them months. But, and this amazed me, none of the other online bookmarking services seemed to have the same level of integration with Firefox. They all offered me the second ability to add bookmarks to their service but none allowed me the first – letting me view them inside within Firefox. Over the course of recent months, I could have switched to Google Bookmarks or Magnolia without any regrets if they had let me have this functionality, especially Magnolia. I really like their site (though of course with the integration I’d be unlikely to ever go there!).

On a side note this is the sort of connected services that I think is going to really take off in the future. Not sure yet how you make money from it though. Maybe by paying a fee to use the addon in the browser? Or the more traditional web route of suggesting other paid for links similar to the one you are bookmarking at the time of saving it. Something akin to Sphere which I am using at the end of posts to suggest similar links.

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The path to a new browser:

1. Installed Firefox 3
2. Found most plugins I needed didn’t work (yes its in beta I should be patient)
3. Read a post about memory issues in Firefox generally (which I felt constantly) and how Flock was not (no longer?) just an “addon” to Firefox but a complete replacement. Supposedly it integrated new social platforms (Facebook, Flickr, delicious, twitter) and solved the memory issues with Firefox. The latter especially was a sweeping statement but he went on to say that he was wrong about Flock.
4. So seeing as I had the same opinion of Flock when I tried it at launch I figured maybe I should give it a try
5. Downloaded.
6. Installed.
7. Love it – didn’t need several plugins and I only had to add IETab, mouse gestures and FireFTP. I await to see the memory improvements but I love the media streams.

ok so the test with opera collapsed – I stopped using it very shortly after my last post. Too inflexible and I just didnt like the interface. I went back to IE 7 before trying the final release of Firefox 2..

.. and now I am a convert again for the first time in about 9 months. I wonder how long it will last this time – I have a sneaky feeling this time could be for good. It brings back memories of when I switched from Netscape to IE all those years ago. So why the change?

Delicious integration, mouse gestures, faster AJAX sites, more plugins – and more importantly it doesn’t feel like im now missing out on anything by switching.. IE7 feels no quicker than firefox and there was only things to gain by switching.

One great thing about the delicious integration is its allowing me to access my work and home favourites whether I am at home or work. This convergence between web and desktop is definitely the way to go – I disliked delicious.com as a website app – I used it only to store random links I hardly used (and therefore rarely logged into it). Now it stores all my links and I use it daily.

interesting – when you click a link in the profile of a live messenger user it opened up in IE rather than my default browser..

I have switched to Opera.

Not 6 months ago I thought it was a dying browser on the desktop – destined only for connected devices. A healthy market in itself of course. Why? Well Firefox was beating it hands down. No one really talked about Opera – its Firefox this and Firefox that these days.

So why change now? Well I hate Firefox. OK hate is a strong word but I dislike using it. It is slow. It has always felt slow. When I open my browser I want it to feel responsive. I do not want to sit and wait for my computer to catch up with me.

Internet Explorer 6 was fast. One click and chapow! there it is ready to browse I switched to IE 7 and suddenly it feels that little bit slower. Enough to make me search for a speed comparison.

This is what I found:

That extra 0.8s load time between IE6 and IE7 is noticeable (assuming RC1 is of similar load time). Firefox is confirmed as being slow to start.. whereas Opera runs away with it.

Anyhow time to find out if Opera cuts the mustard.

Huge thanks to Tarquin for the info, you can go here to see the results in more detail (Rendering CSS, Rendering table, script speed, multiple images and history) as well as times for other browsers.