The only reason Google is still my default search engine on desktop is …. dates.

I’m a dev and the date next to each search result helps me skip a ton of irrelevant links and get to the ones that most likely apply to my situation. DDG and other search engines usually don’t show any dates.

I’ve sent feedback to DDG on this but obviously that had no impact. If they add dates, I’m done with Google.

On mobile I still use DDG since my searches are generally not date specific.

In all fairness, my usage is still minimal at this point. I’ve only searched a couple of times, but the thing I needed popped right up. Maybe my experience will change over time.

I’ve been an Airmail (Mac) user for many years now. But it’s been really buggy lately and there’s no motivation to fix the issues apparently. So I switched to Thunderbird about a month ago after a lot of research. It’s … ok.

• Search is great.
• Seeing stats/charts on my last 20 years of emails is super interesting.
• Composing emails is not great, but I use a markdown plugin that makes it better … but it’s still pretty bad UX.
• I hate the way it quotes previous emails with “>” for each line instead of an indented block quote. Maybe I’m missing the setting to turn that off.
• I miss having an avatar/icon for each sender. It let me quickly visually scan my inbox for the person I want to talk to instead of parsing through all the text.
• The spacing of elements in certain places is weird and inconsistent. In places where it’s too tight it feels cramped and bothers me.
• You can’t compose a reply inline. You just have to use a floating window on top of the rest of the app.
• I miss the one-key shortcuts to label and archive emails. This was originally a GMail feature and Airmail also implemented it.
• Sending an email doesn’t happen in the background. You have to stare at a progress bar modal while it sends, and it seems to take forever. I just want to move on to my next email but I’m stuck waiting.
• The tabbed interface is really nice. It’s definitely an underrated feature.
• I wish it had super advanced rules like you get with MailMate. But what it offers is fine for 99% of users.

Again, I might be missing some settings to correct some of these issues, so take it all with a grain of salt. But these are my takeaways after about a month of usage.