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Comment by throwayEngineer | Hacker News Reader

Is this a coordinated ad campaign for Firefox?

I find it odd how there will be Google Hate, and unanimous Firefox support.

I guess I'm looking to hear from users who actually removed Google from their life and are happy. Chrome is only 1 of the Google products I've used.

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I starting switching away from Google over the last year. The biggest step was moving off my Gmail account, and the trigger for that was the UI terribleness of Gmail. That took a few hours of updating every account I have with my new address. Password manager really helped with this.

I've never been much of a Chrome user. A few years ago, Chrome was unusable for me on my 2GB work machine, and was a battery-killer on my own laptop. So I stuck with Firefox at work, Safari at home.

DDG is a great search engine. I can't remember the last time I used the "!g" operator, and got any results better than the DDG ones.

The one product I still use Google for is maps, and only when I want to see a good street view or areal photo. For mobile, Apple Maps does just fine. For simple directions on the desktop, OSM works great.

I'm totally happy. 10 years ago, Google was putting things out there that weren't possible with other services. Their mapping was tremendously better than MapQuest, their email was so much nicer than Hotmail, etc.

But now they're bloated and slow. Everything seems to lag as you watch the UI components slowly appear on the screen. And the alternatives today for each product (search, maps, email, browser) are all very much competent.

Try !sp if you want to see Google results, no need to use !g directly even if you did prefer the results. Google Maps and Youtube are very difficult to replace, if you live in a big city using varied modes of transit (walking, bus/train, driving), Google Maps is really tough to beat. I reduced my Google-coverage, but I don't intend to eliminate it altogether.

What did you move to for email? Fastmail with a custom domain? I've long considered ProtonMail but unlikely to go that route.

I'm between paying for iCloud storage and using that, or Outlook.com The additional phone backup space with iCloud would be very nice anyway, so as a monthly payment, it's a one-stop shop. At this point it's extremely unlikely I'll ever go back to Android so that works for me. Or, just moving to Outlook.com. I'm leaning towards Outlook simply because of the better calendar system. Both Gmail and Outlook support email reminders for calendar items. I could get used to iOS-only notifications, but I really prefer notifications to come through email since I often include explicit instructions.

I went with Fastmail, with their domain. If I were to do it again, I probably would use my own domain (and I may do that in the future). I can't say enough good things about Fastmail's UI. It's just as snappy as a native app, and is both consistent and intuitive. Outlook.com is also really nice. I use it for work email, and have no complaints at all.

Thanks for the StartPage tip! I'm going to start doing that whenever I want a second opinion on my search results.

Google is an ad company that profits off of users' personal information. Mozilla has demonstrated itself to be privacy oriented. HN users are generally privacy oriented. It's not surprising there is a big push to use Firefox, especially with the increasing Chromium usage.

This is probably a response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20044430

> I find it odd how there will be Google Hate, and unanimous Firefox support.

You can choose to not pick a side on a two-candidate election. The most voted-for candidate will still be elected.

(Even when you factor in indirect systems like an electoral college, someone will be elected.)

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