https://medium.com/codex/why-i-switched-from-google-chrome-to-sidekick-browser-63979c873897
Are you tired of Google Chrome eating up all your memory, or making your computer fan turn like a jet engine? Do you get lost in all the tabs that are opened in your browser? Do you always feel stressed when closing your browser because there are several open tabs with websites that took you hours to find and are still needed for some of your pending tasks? Then you might be lucky because with the Sidekick browser I found a solution to all of those issues.
… during the second browser war, I was already a converted Mozilla Firefox user, leaving the old and dusty Internet Explorer behind when I first tried out Google Chrome. It must have been in 2012 or so and I quickly felt for the new rising star in the browser sky. It was not only the better overall performance than every other browser offered but also the more minimalistic and clean UI. Why having a dedicated search field when you could just enter your google queries in the address bar? Further, it offered more space for the different tabs than Internet Explorer. Sure, some of those reasons were just opinions but it made me stick with Google Chrome for almost a decade.
Comparison of the browser designs back in 2012
Even though Google Chrome was in my opinion one of the best browsers on the market, I had to realize that all the performance came at a certain cost. The architectural design of Google Chrome starts a new process for every single site loaded in a new tab. This, combined with my excessive browsing behavior when researching a problem during work finally ended up in Chrome using up a large amount of my memory. Even with 16GB of RAM I sometimes faced the situation when my computer slowed down because of excessive memory paging.
Soon I learned that there is a simple but powerful solution to this problem that came by the name of tab suspending. Since we barely use all the opened tabs in a browser at the same time, we could allow browser plugins to suspend tabs that were not being used for a certain amount of time. After trying different Chrome extensions that did tab suspending I came across an extension called “The Great Suspender”. For years I was really happy with this setup and didn’t see anything bad until a friend made me aware of an issue on the great suspender GitHub repo that was opened on November 3rd, 2020. The issue mentioned, that the maintainer of the code, sold the extension to parties unknown, that might use it for malicious tracking and fraud actions. Soon after I found various articles that recommend removing The Great Suspender extension from the browser.
I knew that the convenience that The Great Suspender gave me wasn’t worth it to risk a malware infection. I uninstalled the extension and was facing again the same problem I solved years before. The high memory consumption of my browser led me one more time to search for another extension to do tab suspending. This time was even pickier when browsing the chrome web store and suddenly came across a browser called Sidekick, which seemed to already include a tab suspender. Even though I didn’t really want to switch to another browser, it somehow felt as it was worth it to give it a shot.
After installing the Sidekick browser, the first thing that I noticed was the shiny “apps”-bar. After playing around, I found out that it not only asked me to import my Chrome bookmarks but also install all the Chrome extensions I did use before. The only thing that did not work right out of the box was the configuration of the Keepassxc extension. Anyway, after some research, I found a quick solution for that.
After the easy on-boarding, I was impressed that Sidekick browser not only implements the Tab suspender I was longing for but also directly integrated an Adblocker as well as a fingerprinting defense that prevents websites from tracking you.
Integrated Adblocker