I started feeling like I had all my eggs in the same basket. Google has my email, it knows where I want to go and when (Google Maps), it translates stuff for me, and it knows what I search for. While it doesn't really affect me that Google has all this information, I've become more and more uncomfortable with the fact that they do.

So I figured if I had a choice of two search engines, where I get satisfying results in both of them, and one of them doesn't track me, why go for the one that tracks me?

I'd gladly do the same switch when it comes to Gmail, but I really really like Gmail's web interface, haven't gotten over that hurdle yet.

EDIT: I also switched from Google Chrome for pretty much the same reasons.

I made the jump to Fastmail.com and couldn't be happier. The UI is very snappy (much faster than Gmail's), the actual notifications and delivery is faster, and it's a better experience overall, for me.

Plus, Google doesn't get to see my mail any more. Ditto for Firefox vs Chrome.

I'm a fan of moving away from Google where possible as well, but Fastmail would cost me $500/year with 10 accounts. My G Suite account is one of the original, so I can have up to 200 accounts for free. Granted, it's only 15GB of storage, but even after about 10 years, I only have about 1GB in my inbox, so I'm ok with the lower amount of space.

Wow, what do you do with 10 accounts? Isn't checking all of them a hassle?

I have multiple domains and aliases, and Fastmail is much better at those than Google Apps ever was (I also have the free plan but you can never change your initial domain), so I'm much happier.

Several accounts are for separating services - AWS has it's own account, for example, so does Dropbox. I use a different email address for forums and such.

A few for friends and family as well. --Friends I can tell to pay for themselves if I need to, but family, not so much.

Edit: As for checking them, most don't get many emails, and every good email app can handle multiple accounts easily, so I get notifications on my phone.

Fastmail allows you to do things like [email protected], and then you can filter emails by that domain name. Lets you easily block out spam without having completely different email addresses.

I have six. Some of my clients ask me to manage their AdWords for them. Plus, I occasionally need to log in to my wife's Gmail account. (To confirm logins when paying bills, for example. Anything personal, she's smart enough to keep on her own domain.)

So you don't really have six, you just have five of other people's logins?

Fastmail give you free aliases.

FastMail aliases are great. I've used some for sites I'm more likely to want to cut off access to me, for instance. Whereas [email protected] gives you sortability, a true alias gives you the easy ability to just shut a site out of access to you.

Another issue I had was that my main email address was already in Google and Microsoft's systems for a couple reasons, and it wouldn't let me set it properly when changing my email address everywhere. So I have google@ and microsoft@ aliases just to work around their account management quirks.

The problem with aliases is still that they route to one account, and if it's compromised, there's no separation.

Interesting that you bring up the UI, switching to Fastmail's UI made me start checking/managing my personal email like a responsible adult again.

I could never get over the way using GMail felt like fighting with a sluggish toy version of email compared to desktop outlook (and I'm not really a fan of outlook, either). I just assumed that GMail's interface was the best a webapp could offer: it was the best I'd seen so far and had a no-longer-deserved "who could beat gmail at webmail?" bug in my mind.

I'm kinda surprised fastmail hasn't made larger inroads among the kind of techies that will occasionally bemoan giving their lives over to google.

I am really surprised at how fast its UI loads and operates. It feels like a native app in a web where everything else feels like a slug. Major props to Fastmail for this. Hell, even Thunderbird feels slower.

Did you consider protonmail? If so, why fastmail?

This discussion last month includes many anecdotes regarding various email providers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15029186

I can only speak for my own decision-making process, but I like to pay for my email so that I have greater confidence that the provider will still be in business 10 years from now, and more confidence that my data is my own.

Really like Fastmail.

How does paying ensure the data is your own?

Paying means that the provider doesn't have to mine your email for keywords in order to display targeted ads (yeah, I know Google theoretically stopped doing this recently). So perhaps "your own" in the sense that another entity isn't accessing it.

> So perhaps "your own" in the sense that another entity isn't accessing it.

Do they have a spam filter? If yes, how do they filter emails without accessing it?

You're the customer, not their product.

But the data is still not in your control. Right?

Protonmail has paid plans.

It does every time you send an email to someone with a gmail address ;-)

I also agree that Fastmail is great.

Same here, trying to avoid it as much as possible Google now mainly has my email and calendar. I feel like there should be a better option for calendar but I haven't been able to find it yet (probably because I use DDG :P), but sadly, the only thing with a better interface than Gmail is Google Inbox, so...

The problem is that Google often provides the best service for the buck. But even if money is taken out of the equation some Google services are just the best. Like Google maps or even G suite (this might vary by person).

Hard to avoid them in that case.

Any centralized efforts for this kind of thing? I'd like the same..

You went from Chrome to Firefox?

Safari at the moment but thinking about going to Firefox

I switched from Chrome to Brave a few months ago. https://www.brave.com/

I attempted it but extension support is not especially user-friendly.

I would recommend Vivaldi as it supports Chrome extensions. Chrome apps can be installed, but not used (hopefully Vivaldi fixes that).

I really like the idea of Brave, but not having extension support is a major hurdle which I hope they get over.

I'm currently using Vivaldi, but have to say that it's not really an ideal analogue of Chrome as it doesn't carry over some of the everyday features and affordances of Chrome. That's partly understandable, because it's actually (apparently) intended to be a browser for Opera users to migrate to. It's also a bit buggy.

I'm surprised there isn't a straightforward and user-friendly Google-less Chromium browser available.

I 100% agree with your statement, but I feel that Vivaldi is currently the best browser that's close to Chrome in terms of feature parity. Hopefully though, with more support, they will become an efficient browser that's unique enough to be separate from Chrome but have the features we know and love.

Been using Brave on mobile and it's great, but the UI layout on desktop is awkward so I don't use it there.

Anecdotally I'm in the same boat. I use Firefox at work on Linux, but at home (on MacOS) Safari works/looks/feels better than Firefox.

Firefox on Android is vastly superior experience due to one simple thing - extensions. microBlock origin makes web actually usable again on mobile platforms.

Yes, yes and yes. Though some extensions do not work, uBlock works and it's a life savior.

Firefox 57/Nightly! Do it.

I moved from firefox to opera

In my case it was this annoying Google's insistence on telling me what I was actually looking for instead of searching exactly what I wanted, including ignoring "" etc. It became too much hassle, I felt like fighting with windmills, then tried DDG, it did what I told it, results weren't terrible, so now I use it by default and only a few times a week I need to try Google. Maybe for regular folks Google's way is a lifesaver, but for precise search I need it feels like Altavista back when I was a kid.

> In my case it was this annoying Google's insistence on telling me what I was actually looking for instead of searching exactly what I wanted, including ignoring "" etc.

GOD YES! This gets incredibly annoying when searching for version-specific information, considering the differences there can be between version foo and version bar of $DISTRO. Nothing like searching for something specific to CentOS 7 and getting zillions of CentOS 6 and 5 hits.

Google will also helpfully ignore the "Verbatim" option, and God help you if you're trying to search for multiple specific phrases.

Google is looking more and more like Alta Vista in its waning days.

I like the suggestion functionality for typo correction, but dont like it when Google assumes something other than I wrote. This is bad. It often happens when searching technical stuff. I am not regular Joe and I don't search regular stuff.