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Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

You could always switch to Firefox and use something like fastmail or protonmail. Did that a year ago, and actually it works better on mobile imo

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What does email have to do with switching browsers? Last I heard Gmail also works on Firefox.

Google uses non-standard extensions that only Chrome supports for Gmail and Youtube.

For neutral email apps, Firefox runs perfectly fine. For Gmail, it will be slightly slower than Chrome.

It's infuriating how they slow their stuff on Firefox but send optimized stuff to IE/Edge.

Gmail is still okay once past the 2-3s loading but on YT it really test your patience every time you click on something.

I find the YouTube Classic extension helps with that[1].

P.S. But we should all switch to PeerTube or a similar effort eventually.

1 - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-class...

Oh wow, I did not know that. I guess that's one way to give a few million Gmail users a reason to install Chrome...

Switching email providers is of little use for privacy from Google when everyone you correspond with is also using Google.

This is a contentless argument, which I am tired of seeing parroted. I do business with hundreds of entities that do not use Google infrastructure. I have thousands of contacts whose email headers indicate usage of Exchange servers.

It's not about your twelve friends who use GMail, or even your hundred GitHub collaborators who use GMail. It's about the entire rest of the Internet, which is still there, living happily outside your bubble.

And even if it weren't, it's an unconstructive, defeatist style of thinking which does not engender positive change in society, but fosters local maxima.

For every person who does not think this way, society is better off.

And if everyone says that, then no one will ever leave.

False. I say that (and know it’s true) and I host my personal email elsewhere, knowing that it is a waste of money and an empty gesture.

protonmail sells your email for profit. I would better recommend fastmail which charges you, but it is still in unsafe legal regulation. You are not safe from the "lawful" dragnet neither.

Could you please provide a citation for your first claim that ProtonMail sells your email for profit? Their entire sales pitch heavily revolves around clientside decryption that should in theory prevent this from being possible; I'd very much like to know if this is not the case.

Plenty:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8755492 (javascript)

https://medium.com/criptext/we-need-a-new-encrypted-email-se...

Can you quote the part where it says that "protonmail sells your email for profit"?

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