Just figured this might be some welcome news to shout out from the crow's nest. Haven't tried it yet myself, so would love some feedback, me hearties!
Eh, DDG is just as shady as most others. Starting with their contract with MS.
Basing their browser off of chromium (or Edge and "underlying OS technology" or however they phrased it) just helps to further the Google monopoly.
"DuckDuckGo uses clear gifs from the domain improving.duckduckgo.com. This is a tracking technique and can be used to collect analytics about your web browser. Whenever you use DuckDuckGo, several requests will be sent to this domain.[4] This is of course not the kind of behavior that you would expect from a privacy concerned website, but there it is. Do you trust DuckDuckGo to collect "anonymous" analytics about you?"
-- From: https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/duckduckgo
Not that I view that quote as fact of any sort, but something to look into before jumping on the bandwagon so to speak.
Then of course there's also DDG's CEO, Gabriel Weinberg.
"Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo, used to run the Names Database.[1] This was a website that aimed to connect people who had lost contact by gathering lots and lots of e-mail addresses. Getting access could be done by either paying money, or submitting lots of e-mail addresses of other people. Since the service revolved around gathering personal information, it is very suspicious for Gabriel Weinberg to start a business that is privacy-oriented."
From: https://archive.is/20150624075735/https://8ch.net/tech/ddg.html and https://archive.is/N2qe8
So the real advice as to what browser to use? Use whatever one you want that has the features you like and enjoy. Anything else is a gamble in terms of support, security, compatibility, and usability.
DDG was also caught downranking search results or censoring them. Regardless of what is being censored I don't think it should be up to the company to decide for individuals. It should be the individual who does their own due diligence and decides for themselves what they want to believe.
Here is the article.
Yep, I've had issues searching for some things on Google before where I could tell Google was adding a political leaning bias, censoring things, or just deranking certain content heavily. So I thought DDG would be a good one to try out with the same searches but I still found it had similar issues. I brought out Yandex and was easily able to find the results I was looking for on the top results.
Now I am sure Yandex also censors stuff too, but its definitely my go to if I'm trying to find things on certain political topics from views Google disagrees with, or for finding things related to piracy.
Honestly getting a bit sad how not even something as generic as a search engine can be free from political censorship.
I haven't used Google in a while. I have been using Brave Search and it has been good. They don't rely on any of the big search engines anymore either. They have been building their own index. Right now they only rely on Google and Bing search for image search.
Thanks for that info, totally forgot Brave had a search. Maybe I'll start making use of them then!
improving.duckduckgo.com is not something they try to hide, you can easily disable it in your search engine settings. DDG was launched in 2008 and has a pretty solid track record - I think we can forgive the Names DB thing at this point.
Thank you for the thoughtful response. I love when fellow seafarers go through this kind of effort. 🙏
Wish they had built off Firefox.
Does anyone build off Gecko/Firefox these days? Even Brave, the browser run by their old CTO/CEO, switched away to Chromium several years ago.
Tor Browser, Librewolf, Waterfox, Mull, Iceraven
I really like Floorp, its devs and website are japanese but it supports english and is trying to be more than just another "hardened-privacy firefox fork" with it's features
Honestly, it's hard to do that. Chrome's dominance means much of the internet has been designed for chrome. If you don't support the same features, people will complain that your browser is broken or sucks.
Myself, I used Firefox for the longest time before I eventually just got too annoyed with the umpteenth site not working correctly and switched to Chrome.
It's been ages since I ran into a site issue, using both desktop and mobile Firefox. Not saying it doesn't happen, but seems that issues are very few and far between these days.
Half the time when I see a thread about a site that doesn’t work in FF there’s a comment saying you can just spoof a chromium user agent and the page will work fine.
Which…. Honestly as a web dev makes me embarrassed because you should never build a site around the UA. It’s such an unreliable bit of information!
I had use FF for years until a couple months ago. I have been using Brave browser with the crypto stuff disabled. More often than not, isn't chromium chosen because of performance and the project gets a lot of contributions?
I have been using Brave browser with the crypto stuff disabled.
The mere fact that you have to "disable the crypto stuff" tells me all I nee to know about Brave Browser, and it's enough to ensure I'll never install it.
Well, it's only the "Brave rewards" icon in the toolbar that you have to disable. Otherwise it feels like any other browser.
I only use Brave for my school work and to watch netflix, everything else I do on FF. If you feel like FF is slow compared to chromuim based browsers, you should try and optimize/harden FF and see the differences for you.
Personally FF is alot lighter and faster for me than Brave for searching the web and Is what I choose to use in the background when I play games because of how light it is compared to brave.
Also since your using Brave you should turn on "Upgrade connections to HTTPS" to Strict! Just a recommendation!
Have a nice day!~
Is it yet another chrome engine client?
They're using whatever's built into the OS, because they don't want to be just another Chromium fork
EDIT - to clarify: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/duckduckgo-offers-its-privacy-centered-browser-in-a-windows-open-beta/
Like its Mac browser, DuckDuckGo (DDG) uses “the underlying operating system rendering API” rather than its own forked browser code. That’s “a Windows WebView2 call that utilizes the Blink rendering engine underneath,” according to DuckDuckGo’s blog post. Fittingly, the browser reports itself as Microsoft Edge at most header-scanning sites.
They’re using whatever’s built into the OS
looks at Edge
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but isn't that just more Chromium?
You're not misunderstanding at all, and you're exactly right:
Like its Mac browser, DuckDuckGo (DDG) uses "the underlying operating system rendering API" rather than its own forked browser code. That's "a Windows WebView2 call that utilizes the Blink rendering engine underneath," according to DuckDuckGo's blog post. Fittingly, the browser reports itself as Microsoft Edge at most header-scanning sites.
lmao
So on Windows its Edge, so its another chrome client?
Basically yes but only because that's what Windows ships with nowadays.
Yes but it was developed now days and its just reality. But DuckDuckGo is favouring bing trackers anyway
If they are wanting to be privacy focused, why use Chromium? It's a data hover extraordinaire.
Isn't that a Chrome/Chromium distinction?
This browser's installer has a damn huge size of ~760 MB. Usually browser installers is only <200 MB... What the heck does it actually contain?
Firefox has been my main since forever and hasn't failed me, though I have tried others. I worked in a library back when IE/Microsoft was trying to compete with Netscape. I was constantly, gently trying to remind patrons, Internet Explorer doesn't work very well.
"also there's a new thing called google..." that was the tits back then
While the browser on Desktop is a neat idea, it's not for me. I do use the mobile app alongside Firefox and Fennec though.
I'll happily carry on using DDG search on both platforms, since I'm not giving Google unnecessary details about my online habits... and oh yes, the dark mode.
I'm a Firefox user for life but I do appreciate these simpler alternatives. They allow older and less technologically literate people to regain some level of privacy online.
Right now using brave and presearch.
I know this is a Windows release but I guess for my limited use 2 cents with DuckDuckGo (DDG) browser for macOS:
It is enjoyable and quick to use.
No extensions but with its protections feature, there are no ads?
Duck Player plays YouTube videos without trackers and ads.
Haven't used its fire proofing feature yet (a white list for saved accounts/passwords to prevent being cleared after using the Fire button feature)
Now, I wouldn't use it as my main daily driver. That's still Firefox, most probably because of my custom firefox css, bookmarks, and extensions setup (especially containers).
But I do use DDG browser once in a while, I guess to just have that fresh feeling of trying the new shiny thing (or just something out different from the regular daily routine). I use it almost like a tor browser-lite, after every session I'm done with using DDG, I click the Fire button/"Clear browsing history".
Might try it for an extended trial for some tasks but I'm using it to exclusively browse the federated communities and as an article reader for focus to mentally separate from the multi-tasking, less than 50 total tabs, hell that is Firefox at the moment.
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