Duckduckgo Announces A New Privacy Focused Mac Web Browser

DuckDuckGo DuckDuckGo, the weird-looking privacy-focused search engine, already offers web browsers for iOS and Android and browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari. But on Tuesday, the company announced that it is also entering desktop browsers. DuckDuckGo for Mac is now available as a beta by invitation only “designed to be used as a daily browser that really protects your privacy”. Among other features, DuckDuckGo says that its browser will automatically manage pop-up cookies on multiple sites, that it will use encrypted HTTPS connections whenever available, and that the browser will block crawlers and allow you to delete the stored site data by location. The browser also includes its own password manager that can import data “from other browsers and browser extensions such as 1Password or LastPass”. Private synchronization of passwords and bookmarks between browsers is a scheduled feature, but it is not available in this initial version. Most browser alternatives are based on Google’s Chromium browser and Blink browser, so they can take advantage of Chrome’s majority of the browser market. Most websites are controlled with Chrome in mind, and Chrome has a large and well-supported library of browser extensions that can usually be used by third-party browsers without making any changes. The DuckDuckGo browser instead uses Apple’s WebKit rendering engine through the WKWebView API. Advertising
Because it uses the Mac’s built-in browser instead of splitting its own, the DuckDuckGo browser will receive functionality and security updates when you update macOS. This probably saves jobs for the DuckDuckGo team, who will not have to do their own testing or update whenever there is a change in WebKit. It does mean, however, that the DuckDuckGo browser running on different versions of macOS could have differences in features or security that DuckDuckGo can do nothing more than encourage people to update their Macs. Using WKWebView also means that the DuckDuckGo browser cannot use browser extensions created for Safari. The announcement post covers this by arguing — probably rightly — that the most popular browser extensions are content blockers and password managers, and that these features are already built into the browser. However, browsers from Microsoft Edge to Vivaldi offer privacy-focused features and full compatibility with the wider world of Chrome extensions, so it’s hard to ignore the limitation. DuckDuckGo says a Windows version of its browser is “coming soon”. Assuming the company uses the same approach on its Windows browser as on the Mac, the Windows version will use Microsoft’s Edge WebView2 as its browser, which means that the Mac and Windows versions of the DuckDuckGo browser will share a name and some features but will be completely different under the hood.