Halftime Report: Chrome Out, Firefox In

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Well, my switch to Chrome didn’t go well after all. It turned out that the MoJo tech team had an excellent reason for not supporting it: For some reason, when you paste text into our blog software, Chrome copies over every last bit of HTML formatting from the source document. Why? Beats me. But it doesn’t really matter, because Chrome lacked so many handy features that I’ve gotten used to in Opera that I would have given up on it anyway. So I tried Firefox again, and so far it’s been great. It had most of the features Chrome didn’t, and the few it lacked could be easily added via extensions. Performance is fine, and it mostly works well with the MoJo web software.

It doesn’t have a built-in email client, which is one of the Opera features I like best, but that was eliminated in the most recent Opera update anyway. Given all this, there’s really not much reason to stick with a browser that’s supported by nobody and that merely produces shrugs (or worse) when you complain about their site not rendering properly.

But before I make the switch permanently, I have a question for the hive mind. I don’t really recall why I gave up on Firefox a couple of years ago, but my recollection is that it had gotten slow and crash-prone. Anyone have any comments on that? Has it gotten better? Or does it still tend to crash at inopportune moments?

Also: Are there any add-ons that are so fabulous I should check them out immediately?

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate