Chrome: You've Become the New IE6

---

This must be a mid-life crisis. Nah, it's too late for that!

I've always been one to experiment with new things. Learning a different way to do something, going to check out a new location, keeping up on what's hot; all of these things are important to me. To me, digital technologies have always been more than just getting stuff done.

Lately, I've been on a kick to change up my online life. Getting rid of Facebook was an enormous part of changing my ways and doing so has been completely positive, although I'll admit, a little hard for the first few weeks. (It was nearly as hard as quitting smoking back before the present millennium.) However, I lusted after new online ways of shaking things up. Revamping my passwords and changing over to a more secure email provider has been, shall I say, fun? Goodbye, Gmail.

Now in my continuing attempt to avoid putting all my eggs in one basket, I've stopped using Chrome as a browser. Perhaps it's just that I was scared when I first saw the contents of my Google account. There were search queries going back a decade, but more worrisome I'd freely handed over a complete digital picture of myself. The location data was simply scary. I used to think targeted advertisements were better than random ones. I have changed a lot but one's old digital baggage does not. Chrome seems too mainstream and haughty to be my browser of choice in 2018.

I'm moving to Microsoft Edge with the Ghostery extension. It's fast and I want to spread around the surveillance data collected on me. Who wants one company to have it all?

[Update: Edge ended up as a very short-lived experiment. Later in the day, I re-adopted Firefox and will be using it on all devices.]