The day I left Google Chrome and Google Search

The title is to get your attention; it took more than a day:)

I could not figure out why and tried to fix it, but one day, I was signed off from my Google account. For many days, I had to log in every time I used Google services and all other services, such as ChatGPT, when I used my Gmail account to log in. As you can guess, it is a big hassle to do that every day. Whenever I turned off my laptop and turned it on again, I had to sign in several times a day. This is still not fixed, by the way.

Over the years, Google Chrome has become an indispensable browser with all the extensions, etc., and I never thought of leaving it. However, this was the last stroke. I had to clear cookies, etc., from time to time to use even Google’s own services. In downloads, it began to prevent some of the stuff I was downloading—many things hostile to free internet surfing.

Finally, last week, I switched back to the Firefox browser and made DuckDuckGo the default search engine. I began to add plugins, and I believe I will not look for Google Chrome again. Google leaves user friendliness and many services behind to be more profitable. That’s sad.

I have also been using the Opera browser for the last few years. It has an inbuilt VPN service, which is very practical for accessing banned sites. Finally, Perplexity has replaced Google Search for me since last summer, and DuckDuckGo will compensate for the rest.