And since you won’t be able to modify web pages, it will also mean the end of customization, either for looks (ie. DarkReader, Stylus), conveniance (ie. Tampermonkey) or accessibility.
The community feedback is… interesting to say the least.
You don’t have to look at reducing your Google use as a monumental effort. You can slowly transfer, minimise the number of services you use.
Simple - Switch your default search provider to Duck Duck Go.
Easy - Switch to Firefox
Mid - export your documents from Google Drive
Complex - Transfer your primary email to another provider.
You don’t have to delete your Gmail account right away. Keep it around to search the history if you need to. You can set up an auto-forward rule in Gmail to forward all email to your new address, then you can reply from your new address. You can take it a step further and include a please note my email address has changed in your signature. Just like moving away from Google, moving away from Gmail can be done in baby steps.
Yeah this is what I did over a couple of years. Move things over slowly as much as you be bothered… do the accounts and people you use the most first. Eventually you’ll only have junk going to your Google address and you’ll be happy to see it go.
Some (most?) email providers will have tools to help you move from Gmail and keep contacts etc.
You can take it a step further and include a please note my email address has changed in your signature
Email has a special header for this called “Reply-To” which is respected by pretty much every client. When anyone replies to your mail they won’t even realize it’s to another address than they received the mail from.
Also you don’t need to keep it for search history. Download all your mail with imap to some proper mail client and you can move it to a new provider if you really want to.
It’s like 20 bux a month for your own web hosting…it’s idiot proof with a little bit of effort and I only get advertising spam I signed up for and forgot to uncheck. But that all goes to bills@mydomain.com so I don’t have to see them
I loved it around 20 years ago, but somewhere towards the mid-to-late 00’s it got bloated and slow. It was like that probably until recently if i’m being honest. I heard it’s maybe better now but i’m not sure.
It got better years ago. I stopped using it around the late 00’s myself because it was consuming all of my RAM. But I started using it again about 5 years ago and it’s better than chrome now.
Edited typos
I used it up to the early 2000’s and it just seemed to slow down. I recently did a series of synthetic benchmarks on all the browsers and Firefox was the slowest of the batch. It’s still the only browser left not built on chromium I think. Opera GX was the fastest in terms of benchmarking.
I actually think switch email wasn’t too bad (just take it slow!). It’s Google Drive I actually don’t have a good replacement for.
That and Google Photos.
Suggestions welcome.
There’s proton drive…which i hasn’t actually used. It looks like google drive, and there’s a photo option, but so far I’ve only used the proton mail part.
You don’t need to take it slow. I moved from Gmail to a private email that I manage about 5 years ago. I just put email auto reply on my Gmail saying that I’ve changed my email due to an onslaught of corporate spam. Spammers won’t get the new one because they’re using auto responders, but actual people will get the auto reply and start using your new email address. You can change your email associated with accounts as you log in, or you can just keep those on Google so that the accounts don’t start spamming you on your new email too. The only drawback is that your account won’t be in some big data database and some sign up processes that use services like Informatica might reject your email as invalid since they don’t have a record of it. When that happens just use your Gmail and then update it later.
What’s a good Gmail alternative that has a relatively professional name? I have a hotmail account from way back still, but the name “hotmail.com” has always sounded silly to me. I guess there’s Outlook but idk if they’re the best option.
Get your own domain. You’ll actually have to pay for mail by then, but considering it’s one of the services many people rely on a shitton it’s not that bad to pay $10 towards it. It will also mean you can switch providers at any time without much hassle.
That’s really not an option for me right now financially since I need to keep costs down as much as possible. But I’ll keep that in mind for the future.
https://www.gmx.com Isn’t bad but I haven’t really used it that much.
If you’re really worried about the domain, getting your own is only like 10 bucks a year.
Good suggestions. I just set Firefox to use DDG as my default search… something I’ve been slowly working my way through also, is replacing all the default-google apps on my phone with FOSS alternatives. It’s involving a bit of trial and error, as of course free software that doesn’t monetize the user often doesn’t provide the polished experience you get from a google app. Many of them are perfectly fine though.
I’d recommend also that everyone installs DuckDuckGo browser app on their phone, as it blocks trackers in all your other apps even when you’re not browsing. Pixel 7a has a truly disturbing amount of tracking requests, not sure if other phones are as bad.
If you have a Pixel then install GrapheneOS. Zero trackers or bloat, and better security
Thanks for the suggestion. I’m currently using Nova (I can almost hear you groaning haha), AFAICT the DDG app is blocking any trackers in that.
Does GrapheneOS match Nova in features? Tbh the main one that I use Nova for is to take control of the home screen (removing the stupid google widgets that take up 1/3rd of screen), and letting me customize the amount of apps per row / column
DuckDuckGo results still suck and are not even remotely comparable to Google‘s. The best alternative imo is Qwant, which uses bing and I think also it’s own index.
If the DuckDuckGo result for your search doesn’t yield anything then just append it with g! and it’ll take you straight to the Google results.
It’s a useful trick but very rarely do I find I need it. Only really when researching a very specific error.
