It's really interesting to hear other experiences, I see this really goes deep for you... I guess I'm much less overthinking the whole issue than you are All my switching feels organic in retrospective and creating a Proton mail account + GMail forward didn't seem like a big deal at the time, it's not like you have to self host your SMTP server or similar effort after all.

I agree the "e2e-encrypted email" bit is mostly marketing until GMail keeps its dominion on the market, which might be still for a very long time, but that's entirely up to us. I have some contacts who use Proton and some not, in the same way I have contacts who use Signal and some who don't. It doesn't have to be a full victory for me to make the switch worth it, even if just a minority of the users, the ones that I care about, do jump on the wagon I consider that a full personal victory.

I really haven't felt the Proton marketing push either... actually quite the opposite! I found out they have now a Meet application by chance even after so many years being a paying customer. Not sure what "bridge" you're talking about, unless you refer to accessing encrypted mails via IMAP, which I don't do so I don't care, webapp or `brew install protonmail` or installing the iOS apps do the trick for me and I don't see how that can be a win for GMail, it's just a different app which looks similar, no? AFAIK you can use all Proton applications from any browser, the ones I use (mail, calendar and meet) definitely work on Firefox for me.

About the domain ragpull fear... that sounds very unlikely? I mean, unless you choose a very esoteric TLD the probability of Google automatically banning your account seems to be a much much higher one? but still, if you switch to another provider you don't really need to setup a fancy domain, you can still setup GMail forward etc to the new @pm.me address or else. By the way, the "receive wildcard domain emails" is also an opt-in in Protonmail, you don't get it enabled automatically, so shouldn't be a blocker in itself.

Probably I'm a much simpler minded person, my heuristic goes somehow like "do I hate the company? yes -> is there a decent alternative? -> yes -> use it"

> Though definitely not as much as Google

That's my point, though: it doesn't need to be perfect to be worth the switch.

> Have you actually tested it, though, and found better results, or is that a conceptual value add?

I did at the beginning and, as also written in the article, I did fall back on GSearch results once in a while, but that faded away in time and never felt the need anymore. I like DDG results page almost perfectly: it returns good results, I guess Google might be better sometimes (and other worse) but I don't mind. I think you're missing the point I'm trying to make: there are alternatives that are good enough and, if you are not happy with the product (I was not with Google, and I'm still not and actually it even got worse, e.g. the stuffing of AI down my throat is honestly depressing) try another one.

To be clear, I'm not stating here that DDG has absolute better results, I'm saying it has an overall much better experience compared to GSearch in my case. I don't get the AI first crap, I don't get irrelevant ads results (or at least not that I notice), I get nice perks like keyboard navigation, at least less invasion of my privacy, and a better UX overall.

It seems like you're perfectly happy with Google Search and Alphabet's spying practices, and by all means that's all right as long as you are ok with it, just notice though that the article is not targeted to you.