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Chrome is a trivially easy product to switch off of compared to other Google properties like Gmail and YouTube. Have you tried Firefox recently?
by wlesieutre 6y ago
Chrome is a trivially easy product to switch off of compared to other Google properties like Gmail and YouTube. Have you tried Firefox recently?
- jtxx 6y agoProtonMail has come a long way as a replacement for Gmail as well. Suuuper happy with them, they're really responsive to feature requests and support inquiries. I requested for an iOS feature to choose browsers so I could open all links from PM in Firefox. They had it implemented in a month or something... it a quick fix but that impressed me. hence me shilling here They recently added ProtonCalendar too.
- bcrosby95 6y agoSwitching email isn't nearly as friction-free as switching your browser. Not only do you have to change your email in every service you've registered for, you also need to convince your friends and other contacts to use the new email.
- theshrike79 6y agoIt's a year-long project in the minimum: 1: Start up new email (for me it was Fastmail) and preferably get your own domain 2: Forward all mail from gmail to your new account 3: Create a rule that flags messages that are still delivered to gmail, go through them at your leisure and swap to the new address
- kadoban 6y agoI'd stress the "get your own domain" part. This is a _requirement_, or you're going to be going through the same pain again in a few years. Also, make sure you take backups of your old emails every once in a while. Google Checkout should be able to provide those.
- colejohnson66 6y agoWhat’s the risk of losing your domain from a forgotten renewal?
- imhoguy 6y agoThere is always a risk of loosing an asset, that includes hijacking. However to reduce forgeting of renewal there is the recipe I have once read here on HN: Renew your doman for 10 years now, and then every next year do 1 year renewal. If you forget it then you still have 9 years of buffer.
- _-david-_ 6y agoI would assume most domain registrars send you reminder emails as your expiration gets closer.
- mrighele 6y agoSome registrars let you enable automatic renewal, so in that case the only risk is to keep paying for a domain that you forgot of.
- trav4225 6y agoHow is credit card expiration handled? Or do you suggest another payment method?
- mrighele 6y agoI think they sent me a notification about the expiring card once. Another alternative is using one that accept recurring payments through PayPal; that way you would have to handle card expiration only with Paypal.
- ashtonkem 6y agoIf a domain is important to you, you should have it set to autorenew.
- 6y ago
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y agoThe most important change you can make for your email is to own your own domain. Once you own your own domain, changing providers is much easier since it is transparent to the people that email you. Even if you decide to keep Gmail, you should switch your email to your own domain.
- cpascal 6y agoOne worry about tying your identity to your own domain, is the security of your identity (aka your domain) hinges on the security of your registrar. If a bad actor can socially engineer their way into controlling your domain, your entire identity is compromised. Here's a blog post about this nightmare happening to someone: https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-24eb09e026dd https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-...
- ashtonkem 6y agoI agree that that would be catastrophic, but I’m not convinced that using custom DNS changes my risk factor. If someone took over <my name>@gmail.com, they could do as much damage as they could by taking over <my name>@<my domain>.
- Roujo 6y agoYes, but there's still an increase in the attack surface - it's a lot harder to convince a registrar to turn over gmail.com than <my domain>, for most values of <my domain>. It's not a deal breaker, of course, but it's something to consider when looking at the risk factor.
- cpascal 6y agoIf you use an email provider to host your domain's email (e.g. Fastmail, GSuite, etc.), I believe you're actually increasing your risk factor. The security of your identity will depend on your registrar, your DNS provider, and your email provider.
- toohotatopic 6y ago
- dsanduleac 6y agoI recall seeing this recently on another HN post, where they had set up a blanket forwarding rule from their Gmail to another email account. Their Gmail later got dinged but the forwarding rule continued to work.
- pletnes 6y agoI did that years ago. The only downside is that every 2-3 years some email gets stuck in gmail’s spam folder.
- DavideNL 6y agoYou don't have to switch overnight, i simply forwarded all my incoming Gmail e-mails to my new account, and then reply to all my Friends (etc.) from my NEW e-mail address. That way they will all, eventually, automagically update me in their address book. It worked very well :)
- morrbo 6y agoHave to respectfully disagree here...we tried protonmail for ages and it wasn't good. Wet feature adding it sounds like you got lucky but we ask for several features over the course of a year - ranging from simple things such as HTML signatures (that they fully support, they just hide the button on their editor) to more enterprisey user management 2fa enforcement style features and it just didn't hold up in the slightest. No features got added and we ended up going back to o365..for a personal email it's ok though but I wouldn't tout them as responsive to feature requests as this wasn't our experience at all. We were a sma the on their visionary package if that makes a difference.
- ori_b 6y agoYou can set up forwarding rules and switch gradually. It's pretty much painless.
- ZacharyPitts 6y agoI have happily paid for ProtonMail for the past couple of years. I moved all my important email (i.e. anything involving money) off of gmail.
- cdurth 6y agoI as well. Gmail is now my spam account. Very happy with ProtonMail.
- abnercoimbre 6y agoProtonMail user for years too. And non-tech people who get my e-mail immediately like (and ask about) the protonmail.com domain, which opens up an avenue to discuss privacy and the upside of non-Google products.
- Klonoar 6y agoI really wish they'd merge this, or implement it themselves (I wrote it, full disclaimer): https://github.com/ProtonMail/ios-mail/pull/16 https://github.com/ProtonMail/ios-mail/pull/16 As I understand it (and don't quote me on it) they're in the middle of a refactor, so I guess I get it.
- mtnGoat 6y agoI used protonmail for a week, but i got tired of waiting hours and days for some emails to arrive. some we so late the verification links were no longer active. ugh, if only proton mail was up to par with Gmail.
- vorpalhex 6y agoI had similar issues early on but have been happy with Protonmail for the last year or so.
- spockz 6y agoIs there a provider that lets you send emails from free format users on your domain? With catch all addresses the mail goes into my other@domain account. I use a different email address per site. Now with gmail if I want to reply with that account I first need to create it as an alias. If I want to reply from my phone it even needs to be a full account. Is there any way to fix this? Short of using mutt and write the from header myself?
- pinkythepig 6y agoI can do this with fastmail, though fastmail is a subscription (like $5/month? IIRC, mine auto renews every 2 years so not sure). I have my primary email setup as <firstname>@<lastname>.org. If you set your dns records correctly with them, that allows you to use without any ahead of time setup <randomtag>@<firstname>.<lastname>.org. Setting a different tag where I have <firstname> is can be done too, but you need to set those up individually. replying to emails, I can change <randomtag> to whatever I want. They also offer random domains that you can setup burners under, though that does involve some ahead of time setup.
- jsmith99 6y agoFastmail lets you create wildcard identities like this so you can send from any username at any domain you have with them, but if you are sending from a third party app you usually still need to set up the sending identity in the app itself, which is annoying. The email programs I've tried haven't let me type arbitrary addresses into the 'from' line. Many programs won't even automatically reply from the same alias the message was received at.
- ravenstine 6y agoI think most people are never going to choose ProtonMail, but it can be good for people who like simplicity and consistency. I don't need a million bajillion options, "plugins" or "apps" for my web mail. Just show me my emails, let me load attachments, and I'm good. That's why I pay for ProtonMail instead of Gmail. Well, that and all the other reasons to distrust Google.
- winter_blue 6y agoI'm a paying customer (paid for 2 years upfront), and I only found out after paying that ProtonMail has an incredibly poor implementation of 2FA. All it supports is app-based authentication[1]. No support for U2F (FIDO) keys[2]. No support for sending SMS to phones. In comparison, my Google account is protected with: (a) three distinct U2F FIDO keys that are stored safely in different countries, (b) three separate phones for SMS authentication (my phone, dad's pone, mom's phone), (c) lastly there's the authenticator app which I rarely use. This is so much more versatile and reassuring that ProtonMail's extremely-mininal 2FA implementation. Also, ProtonMail has no excuse for not supporting SMS-based 2FA. They can send a SMS to your phone, when you setup a new account -- but for some reason can't do this for 2FA. Despite being a paid service, they trying to save on the SMS charges that SMS-based 2FA would incur? [1] https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/two-factor-authentication/ https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/two-factor-aut... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_2nd_Factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_2nd_Factor
- spydum 6y agoNot sure about the other stuff, but SMS 2FA is generally frowned upon for auth.. though obviously they've decided it's fine for the one time setup just as a verification on signup (not used as 2fa in that case, more like crude proof of identity). U2F has been a challenge for everyone from what I've seen.
- rattray 6y agoHow does ProtonMail compare to FastMail these days? I see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18008062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18008062 from 2018 where the jury seemed to overall favor FastMail.
- minikites 6y agoI've been using Fastmail for more than a decade and I don't know why someone would trust something as important as email to a company like Google.
- t-writescode 6y agoMailbox.org here. Happy customer so far.
- Fezzik 6y agoI second the Fastmail vote. I have been a happy user for... maybe 3 years now? A while at least. The web UI on mobile and desktop is second-to-none (I love not having an app) and the spam filtering is as good or better than gmail and the other big players.
- input_sh 6y agoMy current yearly subscription to Fastmail was about to expire today. Didn't think about it for a second before I renewed it for the third year.
- colejohnson66 6y agoBecause when it first was released, they were one of (if not the only) (free) email providers to give every user over a gigabyte of storage. At the time, most email providers only allowed mailboxes in the dozens of megabytes range. Nowadays, everywhere gives you plenty of space, but for me personally, it’s just been the fact that I’ve been using it for so long and switching is a hassle. I’m sure it’s the same for a lot of other people, and for the majority, they probably also don’t care enough.
- nucleardog 6y agoDozens of megabytes? Pretty sure Hotmail (which at the time was like 20% of all web traffic) was still offering a whopping 2MB of space when Gmail launched. It was only after Gmail came out that they started bumping the quota from where it had been since the mid-90s. Gmail was a HUGE deal. People were going nuts over the invites.
- arkades 6y agoI transitioned to FFox myself. I occasionally have to use Chrome for work, and it's nothing I find myself missing. If Chrome is messing up your day, it's really easy to cut it out.
- Baeocystin 6y agoSure, and I use it daily. But my frustration isn't about me particularly, it's about Google's increasingly hostile behavior. They're the 800-pound gorilla of the internet, and the way they behave affects all of us.
- freehunter 6y agoI've found the exact opposite to be true in my very specific experience. Five years ago I used every Google product under the sun, today the only Google product I use at all (even search) is Chrome because it's the only one I haven't been able to replace. I try Firefox with a fresh install on nearly every major release and I keep it installed as a secondary browser, but I can never manage to use it as my daily browser. For whatever reason, none of my company's (major tech company but not a competitor to Mozilla in any way) internal web pages load in Firefox. No error, no warning, nothing in the console, just zero content. Blank page. I've tried it on two computers with the same result and just nothing. No extensions installed, nothing I've installed on my network or computer to block anything. It just doesn't load anything. On the other hand I keep Firefox installed because Chrome refuses to load my dev environment with a self-signed certificate. Firefox will let me click "I accept the risk" but Chrome just refuses to load with a self-signed cert. I'd love to use just one (preferably Firefox) but I guess the web is still hard to get right.
- bzb3 6y agoYou can bypass the Chrome dialog by typing "thisisunsafe" in the error page.
- freehunter 6y agoThat's a stupidly hidden way to go about it.
- dylz 6y agoIIRC, the intent is that no one should be doing this and anyone doing it should be at least technical enough to figure out what they're doing and be reminded that it's a bad idea.
- freehunter 6y agoAnd instead many people will just do a Google search for "Chrome [insert error here]" and run the first command they find, while people like me will say "okay I'll just Firefox where I can click past this warning".
- dleslie 6y agoThe only Google product I still use is Android. I won't switch to iOS, that's like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Sadly, the FOSS alternatives do not support Blackberry phones, and for physical reasons I _greatly_ prefer a real keyboard.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoI have a firewall appliance at home. One day I noticed that some of the stuff I blacklisted (mostly ads) started showing up again. Why? Firefox's new DNS over HTTPS was bypassing all my firewall DNS rules.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago> Firefox's new DNS over HTTPS was bypassing all my firewall DNS rules. A misstep by Firefox, though it was done with genuine intent to safeguard users (as opposed to just being spun that way). Though they've walked it back it still needs to be opt-in or be trivially easy for average users to opt-out.
- m-p-3 6y agoI switched from Pushbullet to Join and one of the hurdle the dev is having is that something regarding push messaging was severely lacking in Firefox compared to Chrome, hence the lack of an extension for it on Firefox.
- sciurus 6y agoDo you know any more details about what's lacking?
- eloff 6y agoI switched when Google killed of ublock origin in Chrome. Firefox is quite nice these days. I just use chrome for development because I'm more familiar with their dev tools. I will very occasionally find a site that's broken in Firefox and works in Chrome though.
- morrbo 6y agoCheck out Vivaldi, never looked back (chromium based so same dev tools, though admittedly I do.my dwv in edge these days just to keep stuff separate)
- gowld 6y agouBlock Origin isn't killed. Some changes are proposed, however.
- eloff 6y agoIt's nerfed into uselessness. Last I checked it's restricted to just url blacklists.
- swiley 6y agoFirefox is actually a significantly better browser on GNU/Linux. Chrome is pretty awful.
- sneak 6y agoFirefox’s security is a lot less than that of Chrome.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y agoFirefox gives me much more control than Chrome and that makes it much more secure.
- rossjudson 6y agoHere is a button. You may now decide if you want to push it.
- roca 6y agoHard to quantify, but neither Firefox nor Chrome were compromised at Pwn2Own this year. The sandbox architectures are very similar now. Chrome's still ahead in having a slightly tighter sandbox and already shipping process-per-site, while Mozilla is working hard to catch up on those. Firefox gets a slight advantage from using Rust in some places instead of C++. I'd say Firefox security is still behind Chrome but in practice not by "a lot".