[fpgaminer]

I, too, have been trying to reduce my dependency on Google products. I won't focus on the why's; that's political and ultimately a personal choice. Instead, I would like to offer my experience in the process of switching.

Switching away from Google products has turned out to be far more difficult than anticipated. For me, personally, Firefox is a much worse experience than Chrome. It requires significant tweaks to be usable for me, which costs times and frustration, and is still not good enough. DuckDuckGo ended up greatly impeding my ability to work, because its results were so bad (for me, and my specific search topics). I haven't attempted to drop Gmail; can't imagine how much time that would cost me, not to mention the swarm of spam Google handles without batting an eye, but other services are likely to falter on. YouTube, well, all the shows I love to watch are on YouTube with no alternatives.

These things won't stop me from trying and, eventually, succeeding. However, it is frightening to see just how entrenched I have become in Google's products. And how sad the state of the competition is. The price of freedom.

[e15ctr0n]

> DuckDuckGo ended up greatly impeding my ability to work, because its results were so bad (for me, and my specific search topics).

You might want to try DuckDuckGoog that lets you use DuckDuckGo for bang queries and Google for everything else, so you get the best of both worlds.

http://www.duckduckgoog.com/browser