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Thoughts on Chrome, Firefox and Open Platforms

I've noticed over the past few days that Chrome became boggy and SLOOOOW. There are things I love about Chrome, but it's propensity to hogging resources and, thus, degrading my machine's performance have long bugged me. Being deeply enmeshed within the Google ecosystem might play a big part in that. But, the more I think about things, the more I'm concerned about my personal trend towards the Chrome/Google system.

I highly value the Open Source community and what they bring to the table. Even though I've worked for several large corporations, I really appreciate all that this community brings to the world. It's more than simply free software, but also open standards. To me, it's critical that corporations cannot lock out access to our data. So, utilizing open standards is critical.

With that, though, I look at tools such as Gimp, Open Office, and Scibus and see so much potential. For, say, image editing, wouldn't it prove better to the world that the default image system wasn't Photoshop, or desktop publishing InDesign? Dependence on one company causes me great concern. I really want to start pushing towards the adoption of open standards as the default for most industries. I don't mean to disparage Adobe, Microsoft, or any one else. It should just scare the crap out of us to have only one real player in an industry.

So, going forward, I shall find open alternatives for my work (see the links above to start with). First, today, FireFox for browsing. I know this will also improve my system performance. And will I really notice any of the missing features. Heck, other than drag & drop attachments from Gmail to Windows Explorer, is there anything that is in Chrome but not available in Firefox? I'm not too concerned.

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