The French government is considering a law that would require web browsers – like Mozilla’s Firefox – to block websites chosen by the government.
I use LibreWolf as a browser and Qwant, Startpage, SearX (murena spot) and SwissCows as search engines.
All of these respect my privacy. Yandex doesn’t.
Also:
I just went to Yandex.com. It immediately told me information about my “location” (I fake it). That’s kind of unsettling because I never gave that info or asked for anything related to me or my location. After a single search I got prompted to install the app to search “privately without tracking”. The app is rated 6/10 privacy by Exodus. Exodus lists “Yandex Ad” as one of the app trackers. Sounds lovely.
The search results are quite similar to the ones I would get on SP or Qwant. Nothing special here. Wikipedia, Maps, IMDb, stuff like that. Incredible.
I also need to do captchas regularly, which is very annoying.
It’s not even particularly fast. Qwant Lite approaches warp speed in comparison.
In conclusion:
This search engine is nothing special. If you need their browser for it to do all the fancy stuff you said, it’s basically a piece of shit. Websites that need browser specific code should not exist.
