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DuckDuckGo Launches Desktop Browser for Mac; Windows version is on the way

The list of web browsers available to users has just gained one more option: DuckDuckGo. This Tuesday (12), Chrome’s newest rival announced the launch of the pro-privacy browser still in beta for Mac devices.

Like DuckDuckGo’s other products — search engine, extensions, mobile browsers for iOS and Android, and email protection service — the new desktop browser continues the company’s principle of not collecting user data, says Beah. Burger-Lenehan, product manager for the Mac application. “We don’t track our users — that’s our privacy policy.”

Image: DuckDuckGo

Details of the new DuckDuckGo browser

Caused by the introduction of GDPR, the pop-ups that appear on each page visited asking the user to consent to the use of cookies become less annoying in the DuckDuckGo browser, that’s because it automates the process without the need for extensions.

On first use, the browser asks for permission to manage pop-ups that appear. If so, it will use Javascript to automatically set cookie preferences on visited websites, choosing options to “maximize privacy”.

DuckDuckGo Launches Desktop Browser for Mac;  Windows version is on the way

In practice, the user will no longer see banners or cookie pop-ups on the screen. “This feature works on about 50% of the cookie pop-ups you might encounter,” says Burger-Lenehan, adding that the percentage should increase “significantly” as more people use the beta.

According to the tests of wired, fewer cookie popups were seen on pages, in fact, in addition to relatively fast performance. The interface is stripped down, with few buttons or icons. A fire emoji button — familiar to users of the DuckDuckGo mobile apps — allows history information or allowed cookies to be easily cleared in a few clicks.

DuckDuckGo Launches Desktop Browser for Mac;  Windows version is on the way

Image: DuckDuckGo

As it is fully finalized, after all it is a beta version, users who want to access the browser for Mac must sign a private waiting list through the company’s mobile app. Before the full release, DuckDuckGo can still make changes and eliminate bugs, as well as add some common features to browsers. Wired notes that there’s still no quick-access bookmarks bar or folders, but the company said it was working on that.

As well as a way to obtain a detailed list of the history of visited sites and the auto-complete feature, when the browser itself tries to complete an address already visited by the user.

Burger-Lenehan says the company has been building the Mac app for more than a year, with private testing with members of the public since October of last year. For Windows users, despite being behind the Mac beta, the PC version is being developed simultaneously and should be available “soon”, adds Burger-Lenehan.

DuckDuckGo avoids Chromium, Google’s browser codebase

Increasingly, browsers have piled privacy features into their offerings, most prominently blocking trackers, browser fingerprints, and ads that follow you across the internet, to differentiate them from Chrome. Blocking trackers to varying degrees in mobile apps, for example, is common to most of them — Safari, Firefox, Vivaldi, Opera, Brave, and DuckDuckGo (although Tor is considered the most private browser).

duckduckgo_desktop_app

Image: DuckDuckGo/Reproduction

However, despite some similarities, DuckDuckGo calls attention to how the browser is built. As for the others — including Microsoft’s Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, and Opera — which use, to some extent, Google’s browser codebase, Chromium, and the underlying Blink browser engine. Firefox is also excluded from this list, a browser designed by Mozilla.

By eschewing Chromium, DuckDuckGo used Apple’s WebKit rendering system, which converts code to page views. “We wanted complete control over the code and the experience,” says Burger-Lenehan. This decision was made in part because adapting Chromium would mean the browser would inherit “cruft and clutter” from Google’s design process. Instead, “every piece of code is owned by DuckDuckGo and written by DuckDuckGo,” she explained.

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