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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!~
firefox is good in reliability for me, thats the only reason I said that but I would like to know what your view point is on firefox
@CookieJarObserver @jordank1977 sadly the modern economy is based around (among other things) confusing people as much as possible so your value is extracted by them instead of someone else
Is it yet another chrome engine client?
It’s even funnier when I need to use webcord to use Discord inside chromium to get screen sharing working on Wayland on Linux -.-
Does webcord support screenshare with audio? I tried it myself and it didn’t work, I’ve been using discord-screenaudio.
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.
If they are wanting to be privacy focused, why use Chromium? It’s a data hover extraordinaire.
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?
