Duck Duck Go browser available for Windows

jordank1977@lemmy.dbzer0.com to

Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 2 points – 1 years ago

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!

Wish they had built off Firefox.

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 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!~

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.

Mullvad has recently.

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!

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.

So wait... when you visit DDG... DDG gets GIFs from... DDG... to track you? You do realize ANY website you go to collects basic information about your browser and connection info, regardless of how "private", right? Love how you got this from a shady looking site that looks straight out of 1997.

And oh no, someone did something else in the past. People can change and do different things, you know.

DDG is about as secure and privacy-focused as we're going to get, and people still bitch and complain about it.

Pathetic.

So edge with extra steps... Man luve mi Firefox, its the old reliable.

firefox on top!

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

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.

So on Windows its Edge, so its another chrome client?

If they are wanting to be privacy focused, why use Chromium? It's a data hover extraordinaire.

They’re using whatever’s built into the OS

looks at Edge

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but isn't that just more Chromium?

Edit: Yes, it's more Chromium. Firefox for life.

You're not misunderstanding at all, and you're exactly right:

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.