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 stavrosk@dropbox.yourdomain.com, 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.)
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 address+site@gmail.com 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Firefox on Android is vastly superior experience due to one simple thing - extensions. microBlock origin makes web actually usable again on mobile platforms.
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.