So what is your suggestion?

OK then this is my culture shock because I’ve never “signed in” to a browser in my life. All I want to know is what are people signing in to?

Sign in to what though? That’s what I still don’t understand, I’ve never used a browser that had a mandatory account (except maybe AOL in the 90s but that wasn’t really a browser)…

But of course, downloading Firefox is definitely the right choice. :)

As someone who’s not used Chrome for a while, what does it mean to be “signed into a regular widow”? Does it mean signed in to a Google account with cookies that can be seen by a regular browser tab, or is there some login process to the actual browser itself these days?

Well yes, you move the accounts across to your new provider when you come across them or sign up for new ones (I presumed the problem was that you had so many accounts that you’d forgotten them, and for some reason you needed some legacy information from them). If a few inactive accounts die then no big deal surely, you sign up for new ones?

I frequently encounter people asking about moving from Gmail but I never understand, please help me understand if I’m wrong. Doesn’t Gmail still let you forward emails to a 3rd party address? In which case just sign up for another email service and you’re done. Email is a standard, not a service. I’ve changed email addresses probably about as many times as years I’ve been alive, it’s probably the least likely service I could think of that you could be tied in to. Am I missing something huge here?

That doesn’t make much sense to me, RSS is a standard, you should be able to swap out one podcast client for another. What are the barriers?

I might be an outlier since I listen to most of my podcasts at home on my desktop. I subscribe to RSS feeds in Thunderbird, download and play them on VLC. Since I’m a bit of a hoarder I also like to create my own offline archive folders of favourite podcasts which is often harder to do with a dedicated app.

If I’m on the go, I use AntennaPod from F-Droid.