alt Hacker News>Do you want to use a different search engine other than google?
Yes, type yahoo.com into your browser, or install an app. Non-technical people love installing apps on their phones.
>Is there another email provider than gmail (for the non-technical person - i know you can run your own).
Yes, there are hundreds of good e-mail providers to use instead of Gmail. Easy for the non-technical person to use.
No, that is not how you change search engines.
In Chrome on Android (and yeah, on desktop too) you just go into "Settings" and change your default search engine. I can choose between Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Yandex, or DuckDuckGo.
There are also custom searches through Wikipedia and other resources. You can use little shortcuts to get to almost any custom search you set up in advance.
This has been configurable by the user for a long, long, long time. This is not a surprise or a concession. This is built-in stuff by Google for Chrome. (Edge too, of course.)
Changing your browser, you can do, but it won't be comfortable. I have Edge installed on my Android, but it is not possible to run natively on Chromebook and the Android emulation is bad. I will not set Edge to my Default Browser because it messes things up. It is not a great experience to change your Default Browser on Android. I just go with Chrome and use Edge for specific tasks and topics.
You can set up all kinds of email services in the Gmail app, or you can install a native app. I use Outlook in both of those ways, and it's fine.