Once in a while, a new post on migrating away from Chrome appears here and there across the blogging platforms.
The reasons for that surely may vary from person to person, but one of the main tendencies I've noticed are concerned with possible privacy issues.
Let's say you start fresh with Firefox, Brave, or another browser.
The first roadblock you may face is to log-in to your G-mail account to access your email or sign in to YouTube to access your account. Also, chances are you are still gonna use the Google search engine.
How do you deal with this? Does migrating away from a particular browser affect your use of side services as well?
Top comments (19)
Well, there are a lot of reasons to not use Chrome.
Changing a browser might give you a feeling that you are not being tracked. But realistically you have just adjusted one parameter, i.e browser. Everything is still the same
If you have privacy concerns and you have to ungoogle then it's a whole different ball game.
For starters, your current PC(HW id), mobile (IMEI), browser, email id(Gmail), ISP, MAC_ID, IP address(generic fingerprinting techniques), geolocation(Maps, Background services), credit card info(Google Pay), phone number(2FA) and other factors being tied to an identifier. The Gmail account is just an association with the identifier and not the identifier.
To have reasonable privacy, you will need a new computer (bought with cash), a mobile without android or iOS, new network equipment, VPN, (a new home if you can.), Technically you will have to identify most of the privacy holes and create a personal sandbox before accessing the internet.
Using OS like Tails and hosting your email is a good start. Sanitizing your entire workflow will take shitload of time and effort.
After creating a personal sandbox, you should probably avoid fingerprinting by blocking JS altogether, spoofing your parameters now and then, using custom browsers.
It will bring a lot of inconveniences btw. Because one of the major problems will be banking or anything that uses behavioral analysis. Intruders and Privacy Enthusiasts use more or less the same techniques to avoid tracking. So if you access using your privacy measures, sooner or later you will be flagged by a system.
This is an amazing comment, thanks for sharing this depressing insight 😂
Haha. Well privacy is inconvenient. 🤷 .
Thanks for the wider insight on the topic 😉👍
Haha. Not so wide really. Just stuff I read from here and there.
I use chrome but have decided to change search engine to DuckDuckG. Seems the only way to maintain total privacy is to disconnect completely. Sooner or later we all make the "mistake" of logging in from the wrong environment and we end up exposing ourselves. Interesting to see what solutions people adapt.
I use Brave Browser, and used to used DuckDuckGo; but I changed search engine back to Google, because I cannot tolerate substandard search quality (and subsequent loss of productivity).
I understand what you mean with search engine results and is considering if it's worth the effort. They say the more people use the more DuckDuckGo should get better but im not 100% sure if it' worth the effort.
If you're still using gmail or so, you just take the google machinery with you, no matter what browser you use.
For me personally, first of all I don't use gmail or any of those "personal" services they have. I use Chrome for DEV purposes only and use the tools required there (like Search Console, Tag Manager, ...). For my personal stuff I use Safari, Shopping and Bookkeeping on Firefox (because of compatibility) and really private stuff I do it on Brave.
Besides that I also use specialised Apps instead of Browsers, for different tasks like project and code management, documentation, ...
Not using Google at all as much as possible. My main browser is Firefox, my mails and calendar are in Fastmail, searches are done with DuckDuckGo. And if I really need to use something from Google (mostly YouTube), I have this extension to isolate it from the rest of my browsing
DuckDuckGo has improved a lot since the initial phase 👍
I just love choices, and encourage healthy consumer-benefit competition.
But, I used to use Google products a lot.
Currently, I use
For what I could switch, I use
I also tried DuckDuckGo, but not yet good enough for me. Had yet to improve. Quality is important for my time.
One of the reasons I use bookmarks extensively and have developed bookmarks.dev is to not (re)search stuff on Google as much as possible. As browser I highly recommend Brave if you want same "chrome" experience plus the security and lack of tracking by default...
No. That was a lot more involved. It seems pointless choosing not to use Chrome for privacy issues if still using other Google services.
You do prevent Google from looking at your browsing history though. (There's still Google Analytics on many sites, but that's easily blocked.)
A step in the right direction.
Degoogling is not a easy stuff I just installed fedora for this purpose only installed brave for browsing,using protonmail for email services,Now I am search from duckduckgo if required.
Google has its tentacles everywhere its very hard to get away 🐙
WHY IT'S HAVE THE #webdev Tag?