17 ms·

Worked for me. Switched to FF because I just can't trust Chrome anymore. FF feels like a breath of fresh air.

• ux-app 8y ago
  Yup, same. Switched to ff and bing. Was surprisingly frictionless. Next week I'll be off gmail too. Up yours google. The week after, I'm getting rid of my android phone. I'm a high school IT teacher and have some influence over hundreds of students each year. I've already started to sprinkle in some discussion about privacy and will be sure to inform my students about the issues. Of course I won't brow beat my students, but i will encourage them to make informed decisions. In aggregate, over time this kind of behaviour by google will hurt them. No such thing as too big to fail in tech.
  • danielecook 8y ago
    What will you replace gmail with?
    • jakecopp 8y ago
      FastMail looks like a good option!
    • ux-app 8y ago
      Testing proton mail. If mail delivery is solid then that will do, otherwise outlook.com will be good enough. I'm ungoogling my life and strangely enough, MS is the less bad option right now.
      • calv 8y ago
        If you have your own domain I recently found Migadu from HN like a day or two ago in another discussion. (and I love them already)
        • CaptainJustin 8y ago
          Migadu is fantastic. Support has been good as well.
      • imdsm 8y ago
        proton is good
    • felixfbecker 8y ago
      outlook.com is great
      • AsyncAwait 8y ago
        MS is not the most trustworthy company either, see Windows 10. If you're going to the hassle of actually switching, at lest don't do it from one big corp to the next. Personally I use https://www.webfaction.com https://www.webfaction.com and am very happy with it. Also heard good things about FastMail, but Australia has some crazy laws coming so not sure about that. ProtonMail seems solid as well.
    • pmlnr 8y ago
      I'd love to tell people the only way to replace gmail is to get either your own mail server or at least your own domain, but this is an unreasonable goal. However.... re-decentralization resonates quite well these days when it comes to the web. I wonder what it would take to be re-applies to email.
      • coldtea 8y ago
        >I'd love to tell people the only way to replace gmail is to get either your own mail server or at least your own domain, It's trivially easy to get blacklisted as spam that way...
        • ryandrake 8y ago
          This is kind of FUD. I’ve been running my own mail server for over a year now, and my E-mails don’t magically disappear into some blacklist. Do you have to be careful when configuring your server? Yes. Can you get on a blacklist erroneously? Yes. Does not going with a hosted solution mean you cannot participate in E-mail? No way. I don’t know where this myth comes from that running your own mail infra means your mail will be marked as spam. You’re not the first (or second or third) person to mention it though.
          • r1ch 8y ago
            It takes a long time to build up IP reputation if you run your own infrastructure. Even today after a year+ on the same IP, DKIM/SPF/DMARC, senderscore of 100 and transactional email only, Yahoo still randomly blacklists us for weeks at a time. Good luck getting in touch with a human to figure out why when you aren't Gmail or another big player in the industry. Aside from Yahoo though, we generally haven't experienced any blacklisting or deliverability issues. It does require time to setup properly and maintain however, you can't just set it up and forget about it.
            • pmlnr 8y ago
              That's exactly part of the problem. If email went back to decentralization properly, the whole idea of ip reputation could go away, which is genuinely wrong and against email in the first place.
    • vader1 8y ago
      From yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18054574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18054574 :)
    • bad_user 8y ago
      I use FastMail with my own domain. I used to use Google Apps before it. But before switching email services, do yourself a favor and ditch webmail interfaces first. Pick up a desktop/native email client and switch to IMAP / SMTP. On MacOS a solid option for us power users is MailMate (https://freron.com/ https://freron.com/) ... markdown composer, GMail shortcuts, useful bundles, fast, uncluttered, it's basically what I wanted Thunderbird to be. Development on Thunderbird is apparently ongoing too and they just released version 60. Apparently Web Extensions are in the works too. Transitioning to a native client is painful at first, but it's worth it. GMail's web interface is a piece of shit lately anyway.
      • JustSomeNobody 8y ago
        Would like to add to your excellent suggestions. When you switch away from Google, set your gmail to forward and delete your email (to your new email address). That way you won't leave any emails on gmail but you can keep it up until you've completely migrated.
      • briandear 8y ago
        > markdown composer.. What kind of emails need markdown composing?
        • bad_user 8y ago
          It's awesome for emails containing snippets of code, code with syntax highlighting being my use case. And for formatting in general, the resulting email (composed in MailMate) will be very friendly to clients that prefer to display emails as plain text, since the text version is going to be very clean. There's also a browser extension working with GMail's web interface too, but it doesn't work as well as MailMate: https://markdown-here.com/ https://markdown-here.com/
  • beavis2 8y ago
    While still using Windows...
    • askmike 8y ago
      Can't speak for ux-app but most people on HN are on macs, also a lot of people on linux.
      • beavis2 8y ago
        Right. But there's a certain amount of irony that people are ditching Chrome, while still using an OS which literally does spy on you.
        • Djvacto 8y ago
          I tried looking up stuff about windows spying on users, and most of what I'm seeing is useless (debunked articles, generally clickbait stuff). Is there anywhere I could look to read more about this if true?
          • swebs 8y ago
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10#Privacy_and_data_collection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10#Privacy_and_data_co...
            • Djvacto 8y ago
              I see, thanks! I've opted out of everything you can already, and don't use Cortana, so all I'm sending is some basic telemetry data it seems.
              • beavis2 8y ago
                And also whatever you type into the start menu.
          • deleted 8y ago
  • murukesh_s 8y ago
    Can we make this the top comment or something, so that google folks can see this!. I am sure HN is a good enough influencer for folks at Google to rethink!
    • reitanqild 8y ago
      Na, just let Google continue their non stop promotion campaign for alternative browsers and search engines :-)
  • taborj 8y ago
    What phone are you replacing Android with? 'cause Apple isn't much better, Windows phone is dead, and Blackberry...
    • earenndil 8y ago
      Apple is much better. You can also install a custom rom.
      • gcb0 8y ago
        apple marketing sells you the idea that they are much better... sad that even people here fall for that. 10% of their monster revenue is selling your data to advertiser backchannels.
        • earenndil 8y ago
          Source? That doesn't right at all. Even google doesn't sell your data directly, just ads; they do in-house analysis of the data.
          • gcb0 8y ago
            All those companies sell the "anonymized data" to everyone. for example "ad X shown to user Y targeted on Z at time T" And if you happen know user Y matches user earenndil in a data set you control, now you know user earenndil belongs to demographic Z.
    • prolikewh0a 8y ago
      I had an iPhone 6s+ for a year and couldn't stand the UI and poor ergonomic choices. I was also unable to do basic things easily like SSH without paying outlandish amounts of money for things similar to JuiceSSH. It's locked down in userspace much more than Android and it's noticeable. Things like unzipping/unraring files, using a file explorer, always had problems with downloaded files, etc were totally impossible. I want to go to an iPhone because Google is starting to really piss me off, but the year with the iPhone keeps turning me away. I wish there were other options.
  • mr_overalls 8y ago
    > and bing. Wouldn't we expect Bing to log/analyze/correlate user behavior as hard as they possibly can? Or are you betting that Firefox at least won't cooperate with Bing in such an endeavor because it's not a Microsoft product?
    • gnahckire 8y ago
      > Or are you betting that Firefox at least won't cooperate with Bing in such an endeavor because it's not a Microsoft product? It's MSFT, they don't collaborate w/ anyone anyways. Even if they do, it's unsuccessful. /s
  • sjwright 8y ago
    > I'm a high school IT teacher ... I've already started to sprinkle in some discussion about privacy Thank you for your service.
• baby 8y ago
  Get the tree style tabs plugin, it's an essential.
  • emptyfile 8y ago
    But its kinda useless because you can't remove the tab toolbar? Or so it seems to me.
    • peteretep 8y ago
      You can, you just have to mess around with styling manually. There are quite a few pages on Google telling you how to do it
      • breggles 8y ago
        Irony?
        • foxX 8y ago
          Not irony. The stuff is not on Google, it's on the Internet and directly accessible via links. It's in fact what any company wants, the holy grail: for people to mix its brand with the category of business. It will pass and be replaced by some other fad.
        • reitanqild 8y ago
          Feel free to google it in any other search engine :) https://www.qwant.com/?q=Remove%20firefox%20tabs%20tree%20style%20tabs&t=web https://www.qwant.com/?q=Remove%20firefox%20tabs%20tree%20st... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Remove+firefox+tabs+tree+style+tabs&t=h_&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Remove+firefox+tabs+tree+style+tab... https://www.bing.com/search?q=Remove+firefox+tabs+tree+style+tabs&qs=n&form=QBLH&sp=-1&pq=&sc=0-0&sk=&cvid=06C6A69256104CC8B0163258BCA596F7 https://www.bing.com/search?q=Remove+firefox+tabs+tree+style...
    • severine 8y ago
      https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-for-custom-style-rules#hide-horizontal-tabs-at-the-top-of-the-window-1349 https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...
• perfunctory 8y ago
  I really puzzles me how could anyone have ever trusted Chrome.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • nandshab 8y ago
    I've never trusted Chrome but it was (and still is to a degree) faster and more secure than Firefox, so here we are
    • fredsir 8y ago
      > more secure than Firefox How so?
      • nandshab 8y ago
        For example for a long time Firefox didn't have process separation, sandboxing, etc. Basic features. I don't know how it is now
        • fredsir 8y ago
          IIRC, that's all in place, and has been for quite a while.
          • symtos 8y ago
            Another reason is that the official Firefox builds for at least GNU/Linux doesn't employ standard exploit mitigations (stack canaries, position independent code, read-only GOT).
  • r00fus 8y ago
    Originally when they created a webkit (instead of blink) engine, it was a bit more above-board. But then hubris and greed have done their usual job now that Chrome is the default. Personally browse using Safari + FF on macOS.
• thomasahle 8y ago
  Can I import my Chrome passwords into FF?
  • Svenskunganka 8y ago
    You should use a password manager, there's been a few cases already where malware shows how trivial it is to steal and decrypt into plain-text passwords stored by the browser.
    • thomasahle 8y ago
      If I have malware on my computer, I assume it'll be able to capture my password no matter if they are encrypted or not.
      • ripdog 8y ago
        Unless you have adversaries personally attacking you, your main threat is automated malware. In that case, I think that it's vastly more likely that said malware would target super-popular and totally-insecure software like the Chrome password manager, rather than something not very popular and quite secure like KeePassXC. I personally recommend Bitwarden as a good compromise between security and usability. It's totally open source, so you can run the API and webservice on your own hardware if you want.
  • gregknicholson 8y ago
    From Mozilla's docs, this is unclear. Possibly. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/import-bookmarks-data-another-browser https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/import-bookmarks-data-a...
    • thomasahle 8y ago
      I tried that, but it only gave me the bookmarks.
  • dao- 8y ago
    Should work on Windows: https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/annotate/ea67de243b02/browser/components/migration/ChromeProfileMigrator.js#l120 https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/annotate/ea67de243b02...
• insickness 8y ago
  How is the speed now of FF compared to Chrome? A few years ago I switched to Chrome because it was way faster. Has FF improved?
  • simias 8y ago
    Seems like the consensus is that things have improved drastically since the "quantum" update, although there have been a handful of issues on specific hardware (which may or may not have been fixed in the meantime). I'd suggest to just try it, it's completely free and pretty straightforward to install after all.
  • pnenp 8y ago
    It feels faster on some sites, a bit slower (but not unbearably so) on others.
  • sandov 8y ago
    Firefox got much faster on November last year (FF 56)
• murukesh_s 8y ago
  For me the performance was not quite up to the mark and had to switch back to Chrome. I guess someone (big corp ideally) should just take the v8 and the html rendering engine from Chrome and build a wrapper and keep it open sourced.
• anoplus 8y ago
  Same here, switched to Firefox. Honestly, I hope Google realize they should respect their users.
• terragon 8y ago
  Yeah, same here. Though I was becoming increasingly uneasy over the years, this was the final straw. Thanks, Chrome for making this an easy decision.
• a254613e 8y ago
  Honest question: How can you trust FF when they less than a year ago silently modified installers for a small % of users, to include tracking - which then sent all browsing data to a 3rd party? https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-in-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i... Or after they (ab)used systems intended for testing features to inject, what's basically an ad? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/lookingglass https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/lookingglass