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Why Apple doesn’t allow for you to choose your custom search engine for Safari in 2020 or doesn’t at least have Ecosia as one of the options alongside Google, Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo boggles me. But I still have to use Safari over this, sadly. The reason being that you can’t make the text bigger like in Safari since the iOS 13 update and if I, as a vision-impaired person, want to be able to read anything without it, I have to zoom in and scroll right and right and right and then there’s new line of text below it so I gotta scroll left and left and left and left to get to the start and then right and right and then again left and left and left and then down and down and so on. But when I make the text as a whole bigger it scrunches all the words to fit on my screen and I just have to scroll down. Listen, I LOOOOOVE Ecosia, and I’ve been using it on my Windows computer since there were 81M trees planted, but this is an ESSENTIAL thing for me on here. I will change my one star-rating to five stars once this issue is addressed. And on a side note, kind of a big deal for me is the “find on page” feature (like ctrl F), where you search for a certain word and see all the times where it was mentioned on the website. Please add that too.

In general I really do love this app. But the most recent update has all sorts of problems. The biggest: The app won’t open. It opens for about 1.5 seconds and then the screen goes black and it crashes immediately. It happens every time. I’ve tried restarting my phone. Closing the app. Closing all other apps on my phone. Trying multiple times in a row. Trying it after not using my phone for a while. And every single time it keeps opening and then immediately crashing. This started only after the most recent update that I downloaded earlier today. Prior to that I had been keeping up with the updates and versions of the app. While the previous update did improve certain aspects of the app—like search history and tabs features—it had a bit of a problem with the screen constantly flipping between showing the top and bottom search bars and not, even without touch, just based on movement. I like to read on my phone and this makes it difficult to keep track of where you are when reading a longer article/piece. The menu/app bars were very unstable and would pop up and jump the page at the slightest touch or movement or change in position/angle of my phone. Of course that was the second most recent update. The most recent update won’t let the app open at all. I’m hoping for a speedy update fix because I really do enjoy using Ecosia and love the premise.

The concept of Ecosia is extraordinary: helping plant trees without even changing my lifestyle. Every search contributes. However, it was not without its problems. First, the easiest problem to overcome is that the results aren’t all the same as if I used safari or google chrome. I noticed that ecosia orders search results differently. Which isn’t a problem, but when doing research (I’m a grad student so 90% of my time on the Internet is research) I have to look even harder than usual to find what I’m looking for. And then there’s the error message. “The trees are silent.” 1/3 clicks will give you this message. It is SO frustrating to click a link and the entire thing crashes. You need to either refresh a lot or relaunch the app, because turning back just leads to the same result. And lastly, the most annoying thing: don’t bother searching for pictures. EVERY TIME you click a picture on the images tool, it WILL NOT load. The result is a black image. You need to either reload the page 10 times or actually open the image on a separate page. And that won’t even work 50% of the time. Overall I’m so disappointed and dissatisfied with this search engine, and end up using safari 80% of the time anyways. The ONLY reason I’m giving it 2/5 instead of a (much deserved) lower score is because of its good intentions in saving the environment. TL;DR: the frustration and lack of proper function in this search engine makes it too annoying to use