Ecosia Browser and Search

tl;dr: My early impressions of Ecosia browser and search are promising but not enough to make me switch.

I recently stumbled my way into hearing about Ecosia. They're a search engine and browser backed by a non-profit where they turn any excess revenue into planting trees. That sounds much nicer than the usual, excess revenue turning into the constantly-ballooning demand for more shareholder value. I decided to do some rough tests of each.

Browser

The browser is about as close to a barebones Chromium as you can get.

The mobile app doesn't allow you to change your search engine from their ecosia, as far as I can find, so if you don't want to use that for search, that will quickly wipe out any value for that browser. The desktop app does allow that change.

The desktop app doesn't come with the ad blocker enabled by default, but it is there in the settings. The mobile app includes it by default.

Otherwise, there's not a lot to talk about here that I can see.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. It might be pretty good for you, because it is as lightweight and efficient as possible without all the extra layers that Google adds to Chrome or Microsoft adds to Edge or even some of the other smaller Chromium variants.

Professionally, I use enough of the extra crap that Microsoft adds to Edge, including but not limited to vertical tabs and a lot of little ways that Microsoft 365 is built in, that I think it still makes sense to keep Edge my primary work browser.

My personal mobile browser I'll stick with Firefox if only because I can change my search engine and I'm not sold on ecosia for that (see below).

There's maybe a bit more room for me to consider it instead of Firefox as my primary desktop personal browser. They're probably pretty close on privacy protection, maybe a little better extension support, ad blocker built in, and it also being Chromium does make it a little more natural for me to use it personally as I do Edge professionally. I'll still call that aspect a maybe, but there isn't much of a selling point and if I'm sticking with Firefox on mobile, there are some benefits in synchronization that I take advantage of often.

Search Engine

The search engine is largely a skin of either Google or Bing. You can select which set of results you prefer, if you allow some more cookies - it is nice that they give that choice and actually explain it, rather than throwing up a prompt and hoping you click yes. There are also some other providers that add instant answers and other features, with a lot of the more interesting ones being those that are more about social and environmental responsibility. Most of the categories of results show up within their interface, but then Maps just redirects you entirely to Google Maps. See their documentation for more. If you're not regularly doing the kind of environmental research those extra features help with, I don't know if there's much of an advantage here but it may not be a meaningful step backwards either, while knowing you're helping plant trees instead of line investor accounts.

It does also have an option for whether to have personalized search results, instead of assuming that obviously you want those to get slightly better results. I do think there are some cases where personalized results do help me. I do a lot of searches for Drupal things, and I might not always attach "Drupal" to the search terms, but my search engine with personalized results sometimes seems to skew the results toward it anyway. But it is still the right thing to allow people to decide whether that is worth more tracking. Also, as far as I can see, they don't try to do any tracking you anywhere else - just the searches that you make on their search engine if you enable it.

Again, I'm unlikely to change. I use Bing for a couple of reasons, one that is entirely selfish and one that is a bit more practical:

1. Microsoft Rewards funds my Xbox habit. I haven't paid for a game in years. I just build up points and then buy old games on a $15 sale that I can play for 200 hours and by the end of that I've got lots of points for more.
2. Integrated SharePoint search. This is really useful if your organization does hold a lot of important information in SharePoint, as you can search it as fast as you could search the web.

Ecosia isn't doing enough to make me want to replace those, as much as in principle I would love to support their cause. Maybe I could do like the browser: keep Bing for my work searches and switch to ecosia for personal searches. On personal searches the SharePoint aspect is a moot point, and I could probably still pick up enough reward points from professional searches that I could still keep my gaming backlog longer than I ever have much hope of catching up to. I'll keep considering that, maybe come back to see if it has evolved at all every few months.