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Aaron Campbell
Aaron Campbell

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Google Fast: Day 0

getting rid of Google

I am going to try to not use a Google product for one month.

dear gods, why?

Recently I fully made the switch from Chrome to Vivaldi. I tried a few other browsers, including Brave, but Vivaldi had all the power features I needed and all the privacy I wanted. I liked the concept of Brave but I could get 90% of what I liked about Brave in Vivaldi with the right plugins. Vivaldi had some features that you just can't get with plugins.

Vivaldi seems to be very anti-tracking and anti-Google. So I was already kind of heading in an anti-Google direction with my non-Google browser and my DuckDuckGo default search. Enter Nomoogle.

Why not install it and try it out? This will help guide me away from Google products and I can see if I can live without all the Google products that I use. Plus, it is January, the month of resolutions, and I am a sucker for willpower challenges like these.

setup

Unfortunately, I can't just start using it. My email accounts are all on Google so I need to set them up to forward to some new email for now. Also, I have an android phone so I don't know how much work I am going to have to do to that to remove google products.

installing Nomoogle

Installing the extension was a simple as following the directions on the github.

GitHub logo sarthology / nomoogle

🐻 Chromium extension to get rid of Google addiction

Nomoogle

A simple Chrome extension that can help you get rid of Google addiction.

For firefox extension check this repo : nomoogle-firefox

Installation

  1. Clone or Download the repo.
  2. Go to Extension settings
  3. Enable Developers Mode
  4. Click on "Load Unpackaged" and add the folder you downloaded.

Features

  1. Get google alternatives in one click
  1. Get popup Reminder, Everytime you use a google product
  1. With two special modes

Strict Mode: Block the entire webpage completly, doesn't allow you to move forward.

Redirects: Automatically redirects the page to popular alternative.

Thanks to

❤️ Special thanks to @levelsio. 🙅‍♀️ Nomoregoogle was an inspiration for this.

License

MIT License




forwarding emails

Let's check out what Nomoogle decides to recommend. After a quick trip to Gmail, I got this guy.

You Shall Not Pass!

After a bit of confusion about where the recommendations were, I clicked the extension icon and got the list of alternatives.

Alt Text

Let's check these out!

Then, I had to set my multiple gmail accounts to forward to my new account. I really was desperate for a way to only forward unlabeled email. If anyone knows how to do that please leave a comment.

Google maps alternative

It looks like I will try Here for directions.

Google Play

I can't decide if I should just cheat and use Google Play to install apps or if I need to exclusively use FDroid.

conclusion

I haven't officially started but I am pretty excited to try a bunch of new services. We will see how day zero goes tomorrow.

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