I've finally switched

Many, many years ago (maybe 1997), I started using KDE and Netscape 4 on Linux. Talk about ugly .... I tried to use KDE's browser (Don't remember if it was Konqueror back then or not) whenever possible to keep the number of loaded libraries low, but I found Netscape necessary a lot of the time. When Mozilla nightlies became usable, I switched to those instead of Netscape, but those days were the dark time on the Internet, when too many sites only worked in IE4 and 5.

In Thailand, I switched from Mandrake to LinuxTLE, a local, Thai-language distro based on RH, and I was pushed into the Gnome camp. I've used Galeon and Epiphany for the most part since then for the same reason that I used KDE's native browser when possible: It makes everything easier.

When I switched to Debian and then Ubuntu 4.10 in Korea, I started to rally for Ubuntu's default browser to be Epiphany. It's quite good, actually -- light and with a lot of good extensions, though not as many as FF.

Firefox 3, though, finally swung me over. It's integrated enough into the Gnome desktop that I'm not feeling like I'm dragging. It's memory use is down by about 50%. It's wicked fast at Javascript, too.

Epiphany, on the other hand, gets all the benefits of the Gecko engine, but has several show-stopper bugs which aren't likely to get fixed for the Hardy release. These finally pushed me over to Firefox.

In the migration, though, I found one huge issue with FF3. The bookmark system changed, and I actually had to google for a few minutes to find out how to import bookmarks from a file: "Organize Bookmarks" is gone and replaced by the inscrutible "Show All Bookmarks." File > Import only works for importing from certain applications, not for files.

So, to import a file, go to Bookmarks > Show All Bookmarks and choose Import/Export. It's not quite as intuitive as one would hope (not the "Import/Export" part ... the fact that it's located in "Show All Bookmarks")

So ends my trist with the only non-default application I regularly used.