I've also moved to firefox across all my devices. I don't use electron apps. I use google search and gmail both personally and at work.

I'm not really _trying_ to degooglify, I'm just degooglifying when the chance comes up. I'm also not hardcore enough to switch over the email on all my accounts, the people who contact me, etc. And I like free things. So one step at a random time it is.

I don't like Electron either, but is it correct to consider it a Google product? I'm not sure.

Electron is heavily dependent on code developed and maintained by Google, but then so is Node, and Go, and presumably anything written in Go, such as Docker. Calling all of those Google products seems wrong—but it's true that Node would be in big trouble if Google suddenly stopped maintaining Chrome or something.

I believe the point being made is because Electron uses Chromium they are making an assumption that it has some of the characteristics and possibly tracibility of Chrome.

Not sure if that is or isn't true but I would say it is understandably a different type of worry from using Go or nodejs.

Why not use Electron? That's managed by Microsoft, not Google.

Electron is based on chromium and I want to give non-chromium based things a fighting chance. It also feels like a memory hog and I like running slack in my browser more than as a separate app.

tl;dr nonsensical reasons that don't really stack up but I'm electron free so may as well keep it up

One of the reasons I don't switch to Firefox full time is that it (still, after many years) leaks memory. Use Task Manager to see how much RAM Firefox is using once it's been open a while.

It is unlikely you are seeing a memory leak, it is far more likely you are seeing caching. Using spare memory is far better than not using it - and if another app needs it, FF will free it up.

Hear hear!

I doubt many other people here are going to ditch Electron completely - the current 'favourite' dev tool is Visual Studio Code which is an Electron app.

Even though Electron is actually a Microsoft supported platform, I understand the connection with Google - Electron uses Chromium rendering engine. But, this is not the same as Chrome. Chrome uses Chromium [1] but I think all the privacy issues are part of Chrome, not Chromium.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)

I moved to DuckDuckGo years ago, Firefox a year ago, from GA to Goat Counter for my personal sites and recently from GMail to Fastmail. It has been slow, but certainly deliberate.

Did you have your own email domain? I have an @gmail.com email and can't even begin to imagine how I could migrate. It's my login everywhere...

You can have you gmail forward to your fastmail account. This way you leave it up but migrate over as you can (you won't miss updates, password reset emails, etc).

Once you have your new domain setup on Fastmail, ProtonMail, etc., you can set up a “vacation responder” on gmail so anyone emailing you there will get an email with any message you want to cajole people into updating their address book.

Before I used a password manager I just looked through my Gmail and logged into every site I had an account with and changed the email address to my personal domain one.

This took about a week of focused effort.

Imagine one day you accidentally like a wrong Facebook post and get "canceled". Poof your google account and you logins with it ...

I both have a custom domain email (mostly for my own work) and a hey.com account. I did not try not move everything from gmail to one or another email as it would be painful. However, I'm moving things time to time and most of my new subscriptions are using either my own domain or the hey domain. In a year or two, I expect to start to redirect all remaining gmail emails to my new main email.

I have fastmail set up so that it continually imports new mail from my google accounts, and if I reply from the fastmail interface it replies using the email I received the message on.

It's a very easy first step. Then you can migrate things over one by one as they come in without worrying about missing things or switching between interfaces.

I've been happy with Fastmail as a GMail alternative. Been slowly moving my logins and usernames from one to the other. Only (rather significant) complaint is that since 2018, they're affected by Australia's encryption backdoor bill.

Would you please be able to share a source for the encryption back door? I assume they can access email using the usual court order process in AU but worried this will turn into a free for all like ISP data retention..

I made the move to FastMail about 4 years ago, would hate to change again, is such a pain. Luckily I did opt for my own domain name at least which should make those changes easier if I do it again.

Source: https://www.itnews.com.au/news/fastmail-loses-customers-face...

The legislation specifically prohibits authorities from requiring the creation or retention of any systemic weaknesses or vulnerabilities, or "any act or thing that will, or is likely to, jeopardise the security of any information held by any other person", other than the individual(s) targeted by the warrant.

I think the law is over-reaching and lacking in sufficient transparency, but I don't really think it would allow anything like the common understanding of "encryption backdoor"?

One of the best things I did was to use Firefox Focus for all my mobile Google Search queries. This let's me use Google to (most of the time) find what I'm looking for, but without worrying as much about tracking or having a profile on my browser (Focus resets every time you leave the app). I've found that there are few occasions where I actually want to keep a search history.

Honestly a browser which kept no history but could let me save bookmarks and manage logins (either via a third party app or natively) through a walled garden would be great. Not sure if managing passwords without accumulating tracking cookies is even possible.

I'm also using Focus (Klar, for DE/AT/CH countries - with telemetry disabled by default) as a default browser and combining it with Firefox Lockwise makes it easy to login somewhere temporarily.

But don't feel too safe with it re: tracking, because there's browser fingerprinting that works without cookies: https://panopticlick.eff.org/

On android, Firefox beta (and maybe stable; haven't used stable in a while) allows you to have bookmarks as well as open all links in a private tab by default.

On desktop I use multi account containers and wipe history on exit, and have a handful of bookmarks for convenience.

For both, I use the bitwarden add-on/app to manage passwords.

I've been considering getting my own domain for email for some time -- the benefits are obvious. But I have one concern. If I use the address `[email protected]`, does this pose a privacy threat? If someone wants to try and track my activities online, they can take that address, which is clearly tied to me (especially if, say, I use that domain for a blog too), and then go to ashleymadison.com (does that still exist?) and try a password reset for that address; many sites poduce differing responses to password reset requests depending on whether or not you have an account there. If the response is "We've sent a password reset link to that address", rather than "There is no account with that address", then people now know I'm a philanderer.

I've even heard of people writing a bot to do this across hundreds of sites; it's very interesting to see which C-level executives have been using their work accounts to access sites they shouldn't have.

The obvious advantage of having a GMail or Outlook address is that only Google or Outlook have to know who you really are; the address could be anything you want and doesn't have to be related to your real name. In addition, you can do as I do and have multiple addresses -- not the "throwaways" which people often speak of, but simply different addresses for different online activities -- so that if an account ever got compromised, there would be no way to link it to any other account.

Email security and privacy is a hard problem to solve.

There are a number of things you can do that can help you with your privacy and security:

1) Have a different online identity for things that can compromise you/you feel uneasy about. We are talking about a "full identity": number, email, maybe even things like Linkedin

2) Perform Threat modelling

3) Getting own domain is always good, as it gives you the control of your life

If you are just starting out, check out "The Smart Girl's Guide to Privacy"

These are all good points. I guess what I'm getting at is that if you have to have multiple identities to ensure privacy, then you somewhat defeat the point of having your own domain, unless that is, you have multiple domains that you own.

I don't particularly have anything to feel uneasy about. It's more the idea that I don't want one central domain that I use for everything which is tied to my real identity, either through the domain name itself or through the whois record (although I think you can pay to have an anonymous whois). It seems like a central point of failure. There are documented cases of people having their identity stolen and numerous online accounts hacked because they used the same email address to sign into various services. If you know someone's email address and one or two other things about them, social-engineering your way into other services they use seems to be relatively easy for a skilled attacker.

This is all somewhat paranoid thinking, but I don't want to go the hassle and expense of getting my own domain, only to that it is a less secure or private option.

As my kids get old enough to get an email account, they won't be gmail.com accounts. But I will probably never cancel my gmail account which presumably at some point will have the same stigma as a hotmail or yahoo address does now.

That's the real threat to companies who get to Google's size: their customers dying more so than going to the trouble of switching.

edit to add: Which, I'd guess, is why Google has invested so much in Classrooms.

Yup... I still keep my old hotmail and yahoo accounts around, just in case google ends up disabling mine for some reason