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I will be going with Vivaldi, Briguy. They're really innovating in terms of tab management and privacy features, including an ad-free, secure, and based in Iceland free e-mail service.

The company itself is based in Oslo, Norway, and was founded by one of the founders of the Opera web browser, which is also a good choice and which is also based in Oslo, Norway. Brave, Chrome, Vivaldi, Edge, Opera, and others also all based on Chromium, the open-source version on which Chrome itself is based but without all the invasive features. (Microsoft just this year switched Edge's browser engine to Blink and to the Chromium source code, so it's now an active contributor to the code base, in addition to the others.) The underlying browser engine is called Blink.

If I didn't switch to Vivaldi, I would probably go with Brave, Yandex, or Edge (in that order) over Firefox. Mozilla has governance issues, to put it mildly. 😉

Within the next 18-24 months, I expect to fully wean myself off of Google, which by its own admission, is an evil company - it said as much about itself when it removed from its motto and credo that it would "do no evil". If one removes the words "do no evil" from its very ethos, then one is tacitly admitting that, intentionally or unintentionally, it intends to be at least somewhat evil, no? 😉

Cheers,
Doug

Bill said
Doug, what do you know, we agree! I've read enough to have Google as my Satan too! Maybe one of the young folks here can tell me easiest way to get off Google. (I thought I was doing it already, using Microsoft Edge as a browser and then using DuckDuckGo or Bing as my search engine, no?) I'm just a guy with an old desktop that I use for email, banking and various searches on things that interest me, pretty much, so please no tech talk, you already lost me with the talk about that baroque composer (is that just a browser?), I just want to know if what I'm already doing is the easiest way to get out of the Google world or is there a better suggestion? I sometimes use Firefox but Doug suggests that's not a good idea either. I'm not concerned about privacy, ads, etc, but I do not want my searches to be skewed towards a particular political view, as I've found out Google does. So in that sense I don't see that the browser matters, it's their search engine I want to avoid, no? Thanks.

Wow, great to hear, Bill!

I have gone back to Google, temporarily, as it's useful for my scholarly-related searching (to the extent that I require searching web resources); however, I have used both StartPage (previously known as Ixquick), which is technically a meta-search engine in that it doesn't actually crawl or index the web and instead aggregates the search results of its underlying search engines; however, since its only underlying search engine is Google, it's effectively a privacy conscious web proxy overlay over Google. You can even view in "anonymous view" the linked search results so that your browser's IP address and details aren't revealed to the end web server. Its arrangement and placement of the search results, though, can take some getting used to, but on the whole, it goes a very good job.

I also do like DuckDuckGo, which itself indexes the web just like Google. As such, there can be differences in terms of their indexing and arrangement of results, the latter like StartPage. However, a nice feature of DuckDuckGo is their !bangs, which are search shortcuts so on the chance you need to search Google, you just conduct your search from within DuckDuckGo using the appropriate "bang" (i.e., "!news keywords" or "!google keywords").

Bing is another good option, but all of them have different methods for indexing the web, none of which is quite as good as Google. On the other hand, though, it could just be that one needs to change their search strategy since, essentially, you don't have the narrow "filter bubble" that Google imposes on us with Personalized Search.

You could also try Ecosia, which donates a fraction of a penny per web search to environmental-focused charitable organizations.

As far as browsers go, yes, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, Edge, and Yandex are all Chromium-based browsers without the intrusive Google add-ins and source code, so you should be to install any Google Chrome browser extensions and the like. If you choose Vivaldi or Brave, you won't need uBlock Origin as they're going to write in source code to block ads since Google is taking that out of Google Chrome soon so uBlock Origin won't work (or at least won't work as well).

Acquaintances of ours have a son who met a Polish female student at university here in Canada, after graduation they married and she divorced him almost immediately as soon as she was set up as Canadian. She then brought over her boyfriend, a guy who was recognizable to our acquaintances as they remembered him always hanging around back during the time they were in Poland for their son's wedding. It was a set-up all along, a multi-year scheme to get Canadian citizenship for the two Polish lovers. Forgive me if I've told that one here before.  

Interesting! You also did mention your one son is single. Is he intentionally single, as I am, out of fear of getting divorced and his wife taking half his ass-ets, or would he like to find a mate at some point? Perhaps, he might like to try AnastasiaDate.com. 😉

Kidd said
You're going to use Vivaldi as your web browser, who or what will be your search engine?

I use Google but i've tried bing, yahoo, duckduckgo and they all (including Google) suck.  

Good questions, Kidd. You might try StartPage. See my comments above in this comment in reply to Bill's question.

Cheers,
Doug

Joe said

Doug, I thought you said you lived in your mother's basement, would your Mom sign off on such an agreement?  

Hrm, I didn't say I would or even that I intended to...I was just speaking completely hypothetically. For one thing, I'd have to have a mate. 😉

Cheers,
Doug

Briguy said
@Doug
I'm happy so far with Brave web browser. It lets you use different search engines as default. All the previous extensions I was using like Roboform password manager still work. I tried "StartPage" search engine and liked it, but went back to Google as search engine, because I like to type in an address and then hit "Maps" with the Google search engine., or hit "Images" with some other search term. With StartPage I'd have to first navigate to Google Maps, or Google Images, which is one extra step.  

@Briguy, what I got in the habit of doing is just typing in the browser address bar "maps.google.ca" and then searching that way. When I used DuckDuckGo, which is a different search index since it crawls the web, I used "!maps search query" (a bang!) and it searched Google Maps automatically. 🙂

Cheers,
Doug