Alternatives to Google

Google has fallen out of favor with many web users, due to their tracking and sale of user data,^[1] and liberal activism and polices.^[2] This article gives some alternatives to their services. In June 2021, several bipartisan bills were introduced into the 117th Congress to break-up the Google monopoly.^[3]

• DuckDuckGo - a privacy-focused search engine that says it does to not track users. They also offer "Privacy Essentials" on Firefox and Chrome, and "Privacy browser" on mobile.
• StartPage - another privacy focused search option
• Result Hunter - a search engine that favors conservative results, as opposed to Google which favors liberal results.
• Mojeek - a search engine that doesn't track people and uses a proprietary page ranking engine as opposed to PageRank, and is intended to give unbiased search results.
• Seek Find - a Christian search engine. Cannot be used for a general search, but a search over the Internet for information from Christian sites.
• Worthy Christian Search - A similar Christian search engine.

• Tutanota.com - A robust service with paid and free tiers, which offers end-to-end encryption for sending messages, and encrypted mailboxes.
• ProtonMail - another service which offers "trust no one" encryption.
• Fastmail - a paid, but good service. Friends with DuckDuckGo.

• Mozilla Firefox - uses its own ("Quantum") engine instead of Chromium's Blink engine. (additionally, a well-rounded derivative is Comodo IceDragon, which also comes with a security scanner that scans Windows PC).
• Microsoft Edge - better on power usage than Chrome, and arguably more secure. Although it is basically Google chrome under Microsoft labeling, some Google trackers seem to have been removed, or replaced with Microsoft trackers. Also includes some UI changes from Microsoft, intended to be a value-add.
• Brave - friends with DuckDuckGo. Great for privacy, but enables tracking for Facebook and Twitter by default. Uses Google's Blink engine.
• Slimbrowser, Slimboat (discontinued in 2016), and Slimjet - have built-in ad blockers and don't report back to Google and Chrome. They are versatile and customizable. Slimbrowser originally used the Trident engine (but may have switched to the Firefox engine), Slimboat used QtWebKit, and Slimjet uses the blink engine.
• SRWare Iron - uses the Blink engine of Chrome. Doesn't report activity history to the publisher or anyone else.
• Internet Explorer was a feature-rich browser. Many sites used to work well with this browser, including Yahoo! and Bing. However, it suffered from many security issues over the years, and tended to run slower than the alternatives. Microsoft ended support for IE11 (the last version) in 2020. Many sites no longer support Internet Explorer, especially graphics-intensive sites, and services which require modern DRM support.

• iPhone and iPad - the most popular alternative.
• Windows Phone (dead) - arguably more powerful than either Android or iOS, many think it was a superior option, but Microsoft killed it off in 2017 due to failure to penetrate the market. The latest is Windows 10 Mobile.
• Ubuntu Touch - open-source, many think it was awesome too, but it discontinued by Canonical.
• Symbian OS - discontinued some time ago, but some think it was good, and it featured Opera.
• Blackberry 10 - uses a microkernel for better reliability, and also allows direct filesystem access (unlike Android and iOS), but restricted (unlike Windows and MacOS). Newer blackberry devices now use Android.

• Sync.com - Functions similarly to dropbox, but offers end-to-end encryption (and thus far superior privacy)
• Resilio Sync
• Box.com - good collaborative tools for working with others online
• Mega.nz - offers end-to-end encryption
• Dropbox - Although not very private, this is at least not known to sell user data to commercial entities
• OwnCloud or NextCloud, hosted on a private or leased server - somewhat complex to set up, but feature rich and very simple to use.

• Rumble
• Vimeo
• BitChute
• Daily Motion
• GabTV
• DTube

• Spotify - available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, and the discontinued Windows Phone.
• Amazon Music - you can listen to that on an Echo or Fire. It's also available for Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac.
• iTunes and Apple Music - the latter has grown in popularity. The former is buggy, especially on Windows, and all songs released before circa 2010 are protected by Fairplay DRM and stored in M4P (MPEG-4 Protected) format and cannot be played on any media player other than iTunes or iPod and cannot be legally transferred to other music platforms such as Amazon or Groove Music.

• Zoom
• Appear.in

• Facetime - only available on iOS.
• Skype - paid.
• Signal

Chrome OS is marketed as being just a browser on bare-metal, although it did recently add Google Drive and a Debian subsystem so one could install Android and Linux apps. But given Google's interest in harvesting private data, it still causes some people concern that it may be engaging in unwanted behavior. Some lightweight alternatives are:

• GNU/Linux (such as Mint or Ubuntu) on a "thin-and-light" laptop. Chrome, Firefox, and Opera all work well on Ubuntu. The thin client edition is Ubuntu Core.
• Windows 10 Core
• Windows Lite (upcoming, rumored) - Windows with the Linux kernel. Windows 12 Lite is not from Microsoft. There have been many hoaxes of Windows 12 especially on Youtube.

• Alternatives to Facebook