But don’t worry Google, I’m not abandoning my gmail account just yet.

Tonight I decided it was high time that this blog had an email to it, so I decided to try out Protonmail.

Easy, right? Head on over to Protonmail.com, read through the features. Sounds good. The tech team is throwing its high-academic credentials around, which worries me a little, but there are good guys everywhere who are worried about privacy. The servers are in Switzerland. Everything checks out–let’s proceed.

Then I clicked “sign up.”

And Google Chrome crashed.

That was weird.

Undaunted, I reopened Chrome and restored my old tabs. One of them had an interesting article about an artist’s journey, which I was planning to share here tonight.

Before any of the pages could load, Chrome crashed again.

Double weird.

Now, it’s possible that the Protonmail site just doesn’t like my older version of Chrome (long story about refusing to switch to the Adobe Creative Cloud). Sometimes my version of Chrome doesn’t like brand-new features on many websites. But I find it curious that the Protonmail homepage loaded just fine for me until I clicked the “sign up” button. After that, it would never load again.

It could be that this is all just a coincidence. (I don’t believe in coincidences.)

It could be that Google is gaslighting its users into staying with gmail. (I wouldn’t put it past them.)

Or it could be a memetic signal that it’s time to get off Google.

Anyway, email me at batfort at protonmail dot com if you want to get in touch.

Edit: I checked for browser compatibility and my version of Chrome is supposedly supported. [crying laugh emoji]