DuckDuckGo Signals Entry Into Desktop Browser Market

security week ^ | 12/27/2021 | Ryan Naraine

[bitt]

Gabriel Weinberg’s DuckDuckGo is taking aim at the desktop browser market, betting that default privacy-centric settings will provide safer alternatives to Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Chromium-based Edge browsers.

The upstart search engine company says it is building a desktop browser from scratch with the same privacy-enhancing defaults that makes the DuckDuckGo search engine popular with privacy advocates.

Weinberg, who co-founded DuckDuckGo in 2008 and expanded beyond search into email protection and mobile app tracking, said the new desktop browser will attempt to make things simple for confused web surfers.

"No complicated settings, no misleading warnings, no 'levels' of privacy protection – just robust privacy protection that works by default, across search, browsing [and] email," Weinberg declared.

Instead of forking the open-source Chromium, Weinberg said the company is building its browser around the OS-provided rendering engine. “This lets us strip away a lot of the unnecessary cruft and clutter that’s accumulated over the years in major browsers,” he added.

“It's not a 'privacy browser'; it's an everyday browsing app that respects your privacy because there's never a bad time to stop companies from spying on your search and browsing history,” Weinberg added.

The move into the desktop market comes as DuckDuckGo sees growth in the mobile space with app downloads on both Android and iOS surging to power more than 100 million searches per day.

The company did not provide any technical details on the new browser or say when it would be available for desktop computers.

[bitt]

P

[Mean Daddy]

I use it as my default search engine but I often find myself going back to Google for better results.

[crusty old prospector]

I have used them for years. No issues. Google has a better mapping interface.

[Luke21]

I have the best luck with Bing, but am very interested in this browser.

[glorgau]

“This lets us strip away a lot of the unnecessary cruft and clutter that’s accumulated over the years in major browsers,” he added.

Sort of like MariaDB did with MySQL.

The story on that is the creators of MySQL sold out their interest in MySQL to Oracle and then took that money and made a functional copy without having to support a bunch of ancient junk that MySQL supported. Cleaner and faster.

[MeneMeneTekelUpharsin]

Bump.

[frogjerk]

Brave browser is going to be hard to beat.

[daniel1212]

If possible, I would hope it enables the functionality that legacy Firefox ESR ESR 52, with Tab Mix Plus and with the legacy Colorful Tabs extension (NOT the one in Quantum). and a few other extensions, which enabled more key customization than the whole of Edge and browsers of that engine.

[Dr. Sivana]

Brave browser is going to be hard to beat.

I use Brave, but don't like that it is built on Google Chromium.

[SuperLuminal]

I’ll be in ...
Been DDGing since the beginning...

[daniel1212]

Or at least multiple tab rows, which you can hack Firefox Quantum and Vivaldi to provide (though it seems most users only open a handful)

Firefox Quantum 95

Vivaldi 5

And Scrollbar Customizer (available for both FF Quantum and Chrome/Vivaldi/Edge:

[drSteve78]

Useful, but not always complete because it’s not as intrusive. If you gotta know everything, nosey nose Google will be on it. And then bombard you with advertising something related for weeks.

From a friend, don’t google Elephant Reproduction for images.

[hoe_cake]

I asked GEek Squad to make my browser DuckDuckGo. Why is Bing coming up, is what I want to know. Maybe I don’t understand a few (or many) things... .

[Bikkuri]

Browser Ping

[ProtectOurFreedom]

That is my experience, too.

[bigbob]

So what is “the OS-provided rendering engine” that he refers to as an alternative to Chromium if not a product of the OS provider, e.g. Apple, MS, etc?

[Dr. Sivana]

So what is “the OS-provided rendering engine” that he refers to as an alternative to Chromium if not a product of the OS provider, e.g. Apple, MS, etc?


From a web search on that very question:

That means Blink on Windows, Webkit on Mac.

Linux does not provide a default rendering engine. But if they made a Linux binary, it would bundle with Blink. So it would end up Blink for Linux.


https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/rmhbq2/duckduckgo_is_working_on_a_privacyfocused_desktop/

[roving]

Bing has better search results. I tried DDG for few weeks and gave up

[Revel]

Google has the superior format by far. But Google censors everything these days. And even non political stuff on google can be impossible to find now because instead of giving you the results for what you are looking for then they try to tell you what they think you should be looking for. So google content has really gone down the tubes. And Duck Duck Go really does a lot less censoring.