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Comment by pnenp | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

What will you replace gmail with?

FastMail looks like a good option!

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.

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)

Migadu is fantastic. Support has been good as well.

proton is good

outlook.com is great

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 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.

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.

>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...

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.

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.

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.

>Can you get on a blacklist erroneously? Yes.

Can any random adversary easily have you blacklisted just for fun?

Can some Wordpress or other such service you run with your own email get you in trouble?

What about any when viruses (and botnets) in any PCs you have in your company go bezerk with your account?

And so on...

As someone who's had his entirely legitimate, wholly none-spamming email accounts blacklisted (numerous times) because he used the same shared server as someone less than saintly, I can attest that this is actually a genuine and existant concern.

Sure, it's 'easy' to get around, by throwing more money and complexity at the problem, but it isn't some made up tale.

I would not use a shared server for E-mail hosting, for this exact reason. Even if you are the only person on the IP, you need to watch out your first couple of months because the IP you have could have been misused in the past. If you find your new host’s IP on a blacklist, request a new IP from your provider.

I think "get your own mail server" doesn't necessarily imply that you're doing all of the setup yourself. Using a provider like fastmail (or Google apps, fwiw) is a good way to be sure that you set it up right.

Granted you can't set up your own Google Mail domain for free today like you once could, but some of us are grandfathered in... I am, and I'm still looking at this as a better alternative to Gmail because even though it is Gmail, I can take my address with me if I do ultimately change my mind about Gmail.

(That's the first step, at least. You can never take @gmail.com with you, but if you want to start moving away, you could forward to your own domain and start thinking about where you would host it.)

Erm, no. Yes, DMARC, SPF, DKIM is needed, with static IP and a properly configured and authenticated mail system, but once that's OK, it's fine.

I've been running my mail server for 10 years now, I got on blacklists 2 times: once due to a worm that got in through PHP, the other was a client's laptop that got a virus and used outlook express to send mail.

>I've been running my mail server for 10 years now, I got on blacklists 2 times

So how's that an argument that "it's fine"? Sounds like 2 times more than a regular person would want to deal with such issues within a decade, much less a small company. And it can take long to clear those things out if you're small fish...

Maybe this is too much tinfoil, but it feels like Google has a bit of a perverse incentive here to make their spam blacklist unnecessarily trigger-happy. After all, anyone they block will just think running their own mail server is too hard these days and might switch back to using Gmail...

From yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18054574 :)

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/) ... 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.

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.

> markdown composer..

What kind of emails need markdown composing?

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/

While still using Windows...

Can't speak for ux-app but most people on HN are on macs, also a lot of people on linux.

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.

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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10#Privacy_and_data_co...

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.

And also whatever you type into the start menu.

Even Windows 10 seems much less creepy compared with what Google's become.

The browser is looked upon as the portal to the Internet.

When accessing web-sites over a public network, I sort of expect (not necessarily like or agree) to be tracked and others to know what I'm doing. I'm always in the mindset of "what ever I do within this window, others will see" (regardless of browser).

For what I do on my local desktop? No. Not at all.

It took me several days to root out all of the programs and services in my enterprise windows 10 install which were spying on me or attempting to install software without my consent, had to prevent cortana from running, block windows servers with hosts file, delete scheduled tasks, adjust group policy, disable updates, and firewall my own computer.

All this so that I could have an OS that isn't actively spying on me, and play games on it. Thank goodness valve is making progress on linux...

Do you have any data to back this claim up? I would be surprised if the majority of visitors to HN were using mac.

No direct data. But that's the impression I have gotten over the years. I've seen a ton of posts at the frontpage that talk about moving away from Apple for whatever reason, which are always heated debates. I've never seen any post of people jumping from Windows to mac or linux (I believe that's not a situation a lot of people on HN are in).

it might be my filter bubble, but if I google "hacker news mac vs windows" the only results I get are posts where people are moving away from Mac to something else[1].

[1]: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/969743/46010063-fa... (that's just the top of the page, but the whole first page is like that).

> talk about moving away

It's just that. All talk. Including the usual empty threats of "don't piss of the technical people".

Meanwhile, they're still logging into Facebook using Chrome on their Windows machines.

I also believe most of these topics are just talk. But the point I was making is that whenever someone talks about "I'm leaving Mac for whatever reason" it blows up and everyone and their mom weighs in to give their opinion. It's not uncommon to have these on the frontpage. Why? Because most people use Mac so they have something to say.

However when someone says "I am moving away from windows because of X" it never hits the frontpage since most people don't care since they are not on windows.

This is obviously not great quantitative research. But if I go into any co working space or coffee shop where people work on their laptops. I find a lot of people on macs, and all the technical ones are on HN. Whenever I meet technical people with a windows laptop they are never on HN.

I thought this was quite well established that HN is very apple'y, so I'm having a hard to come up with proper data to back this up.

What about you? You think the opposite?

> What about you? You think the opposite?

I mostly agree with everything you said.

But I speculate, a good collection of today's "chrome leavers" here already use another browser - and are just adding fuel to the fire.

Or, they're not actually leaving chrome - just threatening, because they care.

> But I speculate, a good collection of today's "chrome leavers" here already use another browser - and are just adding fuel to the fire.

Haha you got me! I did leave Chrome (for privacy reason) for Firefox. Not during this big debate, but during a previous one (when Firefox came out with the big Quantum update and it started to perform on the same level as Chrome). Though I haven't stated I would leave today.

It's not a big change like migrating to another country. Most plugins have add ons for all big browser platforms. I do think that you'll see a decent amount of people in this discussion on HN change browser. But for Google this is just a blip in the graph.

The less empty detail is regulatory. "Big tech" is getting increasingly scrutinized over both monopoly abuse and privacy issues. Certainly this is another piece of evidence to regulators that Google is abusing their position.

I assume this is based on a lot of (web/mobile) devs being on HN and them using macOS predominantly based on conferences etc.?

I'd agree with that assessment, macOS probably first, Linux second, but then you have to remember how many Windows users there are. The HN regulars are probably mostly on Mac/Linux, but I'd imagine just the drive by Windows traffic would put it at the top spot.

There are plenty of Windows users on HN actively. Not everybody in tech is an SV webdev.

I visited HN for years before registering and making my first comment.

Those who leave comments are a small fraction of the total HN traffic.

If you saw the a recent thread which asked people why they stalk HN, you'd understand that many visitors aren't start up guys, programmers or even technical in nature.

In other words, I bet HN's actual traffic log will show mobile devices and Windows as the predominant OS.

Is there some actual data on this somewhere? I'd be curious to know the browser / OS breakdown.

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!

Na, just let Google continue their non stop promotion campaign for alternative browsers and search engines :-)

What phone are you replacing Android with? 'cause Apple isn't much better, Windows phone is dead, and Blackberry...

Apple is much better. You can also install a custom rom.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've wanted to go back to a S40/candybar type device for a while. So far this has been vetoed by my wife who fears that I'll be even more disconnected since I'll then only have access to all messaging on the PC.

Anyone knows if Telegram/Signal etc exists for KaiOS or similar?

Not quite sure if it fits within the idea of complete privacy but Whatsapp is available for KaiOS.

https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000649/WhatsApp-for-JioPhone-on-...

> 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?

> 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

> I'm a high school IT teacher ... I've already started to sprinkle in some discussion about privacy

Thank you for your service.

I really puzzles me how could anyone have ever trusted Chrome.

I've never trusted Chrome but it was (and still is to a degree) faster and more secure than Firefox, so here we are

> more secure than Firefox

How so?

For example for a long time Firefox didn't have process separation, sandboxing, etc. Basic features. I don't know how it is now

IIRC, that's all in place, and has been for quite a while.

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).

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.

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-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

Get the tree style tabs plugin, it's an essential.

But its kinda useless because you can't remove the tab toolbar? Or so it seems to me.

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

Irony?

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.

Feel free to google it in any other search engine :)

https://www.qwant.com/?q=Remove%20firefox%20tabs%20tree%20st...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Remove+firefox+tabs+tree+style+tab...

https://www.bing.com/search?q=Remove+firefox+tabs+tree+style...

https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...

https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl/blob/master/src/stati...

Same here, switched to Firefox. Honestly, I hope Google realize they should respect their users.

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.

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.

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?

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.

It feels faster on some sites, a bit slower (but not unbearably so) on others.

Firefox got much faster on November last year (FF 56)

Can I import my Chrome passwords into FF?

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.

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.

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.

From Mozilla's docs, this is unclear. Possibly.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/import-bookmarks-data-a...

I tried that, but it only gave me the bookmarks.

Should work on Windows: https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/annotate/ea67de243b02...

That's very interesting. Good find!

I just have to find a Windows computer then :p

I really recommend switching to a password manager - it's also easier to access the passwords from other devices. For example I can use the same passwords on Firefox desktop and on Safari - iPhone (including auto-fill on iOS 12). I have good experience with 1Password (subscription paid).

I was thinking to just have Firefox on my phone as well.

Is 1Password able to provide passwords and credit card information inside other apps?

If you use 1Password on iOS, it is now able to offer completion all over the OS, including apps. For desktop apps, copy paste.

> I was thinking to just have Firefox on my phone as well.

Passwords sync just fine to Firefox on iOS too. No need for a dedicated password manager.

Yes, password managers work inside apps for logins and personal info.

I don't know about easier. having passwords in the browser syncs to all devices automatically. So it's at least as easy.

LessPass is also something to consider. One way to solve the sync problem is to make it so there's nothing to sync.

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