I use Safari and treat Chrome as just another development tool. We should be using other browsers during development anyway so we don't end up in another IE situation.

DDG's bang features are great. You might be interested in the !sp bang - which takes you to StartPage (a proxy for Google). This way you can still get the Google results without using google when DDG isn't cutting it.

I heard they still ping Google because they also have google ads on their site.

Great tip, thanks!

Did you try FF recently? It feels as fast as Chrome for me these days! devtools are good and transition was surprisingly frictionless. Bonus: I’m trying Linux and it works/syncs my stuff across Mac/iOS/Ubuntu.

I really struggle with FF's scroll acceleration. I suppose it is just years of using Chrome but the scroll behavior and inertia when I scroll using the trackpad just feels painfully "off". I realize this is something that is kind of petty to complain about all things considered, but the issue is just always there. Perhaps with enough time I would learn to get used to it.

I spent quite a bit of time trying to modify a half dozen settings in FF that were posted on reddit to emulate Chrome's scrolling behavior but none felt exactly right.

Recently I had used the Edge browser on a friend's machine and I felt like the scroll behavior was really fast and responsive as well.

I am on mac, I used FF when they announced their performance improvement last year [1], and it felt fast at the beginning but then it started to get slower. I can't explain why as it was a while ago and I did not look much into it

[1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/11/entering-the-quantum-era-h...

Same here. The way I noticed the slowness was that I am used to opening up a new tab and immediately typing in my url or search. Whatever speed comes naturally to me, Chrome can handle it. Firefox would lag in ways that resulted in half of what I typed being cut off and other odd behavior. I am positive that Firefox is (or was, when I tried it last year) slower than Chrome in this regard, which was incredibly frustrating and caused me to switch back to Chrome within a week.

There are a couple fixes in 63 beta specifically about OS X performance. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/63.0beta/releasenotes/

> On macOS, WebGL power preferences allow non-performance-critical applications and applets to request the low-power GPU instead of the high-power GPU in multi-GPU systems - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1349799

> Faster tab switching in the majority of cases for our macOS users - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1481519

> Improved the reactivity of Firefox on macOS - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1265824

I've been using a Blackberry Z10. I relay my Gmail to a remote Unix pay-for account, and only receive from there; I only send mail from a VM on my VPN'd home computer.

This phone does phone calls, SMS, and I use the built-in browser on private mode. There's NOTHING Google on this phone, and I sign into nothing.

I do feel like I'm not part of the game any more, but I'm not part of the game any more!