I’m a hypocrite. I use the Chromium browser packaged by the Debian Linux distribution. I also use Google’s sync service for my bookmarks. By using the open-source (yet Google controlled) Chromium instead of the proprietary Chrome (which is based on Chromium), I fool myself into thinking I’m adhering to some kind of software freedom principles. I don’t want Google “spying” on me, so I don’t use Google Chrome, which could be a black box doing all sorts of horrible things for Google’s benefit.

I’m not sure who fixed it, or when, but somebody resolved the issue involving Firefox in Windows 10 laptops from HP and other manufacturers who use the Conexant audio hardware and software. What happened in my 2017 laptop was that running the Firefox browser would cause a Conexant program called Flow.exe to start using a whole lot of CPU, causing the laptop to run hot – and poorly. The “fix” at the time was to rename the Flow.

The problem for users of Windows laptops using the Conexant audio driver that makes Conexant’s Flow.exe program eat large amounts of CPU when the Firefox web browser is running has not been solved by “conventional” means. And in order to be part of the “solution,” should one ever come, I filed a bug with Mozilla on the issue. There have been many fixes proposed for this problem, which only seems to manifest itself on my HP Envy laptop while running Firefox.

I spent quite a bit of time running Google Chrome/Chromium on both Windows and Linux, but between feeling uncomfortable giving away so much data to Google (when logged in on Chrome) and how well Firefox performs on Linux (which is very well from what I can see), I now use Firefox about 99 percent of the time in Fedora 20.

When I go into the menu in either Chromium or Google Chrome (yes, I have both) and try to edit the bookmarks, the browser crashes. So I can’t re-arrange my bookmarks in these two browsers.