I don't see much benefit in their browser though. I think their "Privacy Grade", which is shown very prominently in the browser UI, is more harm than help. It is much too strict and rating everything down is counter to their intention. Is a B site still OK? What about a C, or. B+? If nothing is A, this is just confusing to the user.
Is there any website, except duckduckgo.com itself, that has an A rating? Why has a perfectly legit site like Wikipedia only a B rating?
Ironically even the service they use to rate terms of service (https://tosdr.org/) only has a rating of B+, because of "Unknown Privacy Practices" in their very own terms of service.
[1] The only exception being local searches.
As to what is going on with privacy grades more generally, we never felt comfortable rating a site an A if we couldn't assess their privacy policy, since they could be doing very nefarious things (e.g., selling your data). We tried to work with groups to get more assessments on more sites, but never found a scalable way to do this. We even licensed various ML analysis algorithms for privacy policies, but always found significant issues with them. In the end, I think this stems from the fact that privacy policies themselves are too vague.
Seems simple!
- DuckDuckGo for Mac gives you privacy by default
- DuckDuckGo for Mac is really fast!
- DuckDuckGo for Mac is built for security.
.. isn't that just (almost/good enough) Safari these days? Plus with Safari you typically get better battery life. And Apple's monetisation model makes me feel like they'll treat my privacy even better than a search engine. The only reason why sometimes I miss/use browsers like Brave is because of the Chrome Extensions.
In addition to privacy though, I'd highlight a couple other things.
- People prefer different UX and our UX is certainly different. It has been built from the ground-up to be clean -- less clutter, less icons, etc.
- We're adding features we think make the browsing experience better. This includes our Fire Button (one-click data clearing for tabs, windows, or everything), our automatic cookie consent pop-up management, auto-blocking of Facebook embedded content, etc. We're working on more of these types of features, and taken together, they not only protect your privacy but should make everyday browsing less annoying.
If the DDG browser has as built-in good-enough ad-browser, I'll probably try it. Though I doubt it has any practical advantages over Firefox/Edge + uBlock Origin, which I'm using now.
But on Mac I stick with Safari not only because of the reasons you stated, but also because of iCloud (yes I know this breaks privacy but I trust Apple... mostly).
I use Brave though on my Windows PC but I may switch too DDG, or at least give it a shot.
This for me is a big part of privacy. It's not about making sure nobody has my data, that's a near-impossible task and never ending. But if I can consolidate and limit who has my data to entities I trust slightly more than others, it's a win.
Example, using a credit card comes with the inherent idea that you can be tracked. Your bank obviously tracks you and knows everything about you, Visa sees it all as using their network, and the third and most important, every merchant/vendor you visit can now track your purchase patterns and tie that with other information about you. Using Apple Pay, I'm giving Apple my purchase history at the benefit of having a randomized number for each transaction that the hundreds/thousands of vendors I shop at can't track me by.
So I just compared them myself for my typical work and media playback (Youtube & Twitch), just anecdotal and totally unscientific though, ranked by MacOs's Energy Impact with the best being 100%.
All with the same extensions (if available, for Safari I used adguard instead of ublock origin).
Safari Technlogy Preview: 100%
Brave Beta: 110%
Orion: 300%
Firefox: 1200% :(
While Safari also used slightly less memory, Brave is the best compromise for me for now. (e2ee sync, chrome extensions and with their crypto shenanigans disabled.)
But again, not scientific at all and of course might differ for people depending on the extensions they use and their browsing behavior.
> By using your computer’s built-in website rendering engine (the same one Safari uses), and by blocking trackers before they load (unlike all the major browsers), you’ll get really fast browsing.
Please make sure that this extension works, if any (and including advanced functionality such as disabling link auditing, which is no longer an option in safari).
I'm happy to see DuckDuckGo entering this space and happy to see them building off of WebKit. And I think that DuckDuckGo is doing some fairly good stuff for privacy right now, and I hope they continue to move in that direction.
Nevertheless, this is a concerning comment. Ublock Origin isn't the only way to block ads of course, and it's not impossible for something else to do better. But there is a reason it's widely considered to be arguably the best adblocking browser extensions right now, and it's not just hype or advertising.
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> Our tracker blocker is powered by our best-in-class Tracker Radar data set
The reason Ublock Origin is currently arguably the best-in-class adblocker for privacy protection is not because it does web crawling or because it uses a special data set, it's because of its capabilities.
DuckDuckGo using Tracker Radar data really has nothing to do with this conversation. It's possible DuckDuckGo's protections are sufficient on their own, but to make that determination you'd need to talk about the actual anti-circumvention features that it has, not just where it gets its data from.
Bringing up Apple is particularly unfortunate, because Safari has easily the worst adblocking performance out of any major browser, so if they are using the Tracker Radar set to inform that, it's apparently not enough on its own to give them competitive adblocking performance.
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> Similarly our Smarter Encryption (HTTPS upgrading -- https://github.com/duckduckgo/smarter-encryption) is also based on regular web crawls and is many times more comprehensive then anything else out there.
This really shouldn't be in the same conversation, adblocking and connection upgrades are two separate factors of privacy. Both are important, but "we upgrade HTTPS" is kind of orthogonal to extension support.
However, since we're talking about HTTPS upgrading, bringing up that DuckDuckGo maintains a large list of sites to upgrade for doesn't really mean that much given that HTTPS upgrade policies (ought to) just all be based on the same lists. It's the same issue as above, I'm not worried about what data you use, that should be something that a lot of different extensions pull from. I'm worried about the capabilities, I'm worried about how effectively the browser can actually leverage that data set.
My personal privacy standard is still much stricter than Apple's, and therefore will not be met without additional customization: I delete cookies on browser shutdown, block all third-party JS by default and remove some elements through ublock origin blacklists.
I agree that this is overkill for a consumer product, and I may recommend DDG browser to people on platforms where Firefox is not available with extensions (=iOS).
In any case, thanks for your work and transparency!
I use Bitwarden for password management and I'm not really interested in porting that over to Duck.
Safari-like performance with extension support is essentially my endgame browser on Mac. Although it makes me uneasy that the entire browser is built on Apple's api's, it's seems like they will be at their mercy for whatever changes are made in the future.
I'm still defaulting to Brave until my extension set works seamlessly, though my Developer Console-fu might also deter a complete switch.
I must say, this is a great method of marketing. I've never been super interested in trying the DDG mobile app, but the MacOS option caught my eye. I've now downloaded the app simply to sign up for the desktop option.
Pros-
It integrates well with google things that Firefox seemingly doesn't, eg. Autofill of payment details, and still has some adblocking unlike chrome. The fire button.
Cons-
It has problems downloading most things, and the renderer blanks out when scrolling sometimes, and the the blocking isn't as comprehensive as ublock/privacy badger/decentraleyes.
Worth having as a second install I think
On blocking, it is as comprehensive when it comes to trackers, if not more so -- see comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31002232. However, from the post: "Our built-in tracker blocker isn’t a general “ad blocker”, but it does have the effect of blocking most creepy ads. Let me explain. Using our best-in-class tracker data set we block invasive trackers, which then typically blocks the invasive ads themselves. In other words, if you use an ad blocker to avoid creepy ads and tracking, you should like DuckDuckGo for Mac."
> 2. Open Settings > DuckDuckGo for Desktop (in the Privacy section).
This doesn’t seem to exist? Just installed on iOS.
I've switched to presearch - https://engine.presearch.org/ - which I have to say I'm enjoying.
This is not what DDG are doing though. They are explicitly inserting their bias - no doubt this is in good cause - but I don't want any overt bias at all! I want to see the data as is. As a grown-up, I'll mediate my own searches - thanks! I don't need a parental filter!
That they were even able to implement some sort explicit bias functionality so quickly is also a concern to me. They must have had a means to manually add certain keywords etc to some sort of banned or weighted listing.
So there is some reason to think their censorship was by design.... why? Perhaps this is on request of a three letter agency, via some secret court judgement? Are there other explicit biases that they are not telling us about? How can we know?
We can't know, but do know that they are not operating in good faith - that they are editing results.
Fascinating
As best I can tell, their "decentralized" moniker is composed of "we reward you in our magic coin for searches" (and optionally for running a local node), and "the search is executed on community nodes": https://presearch.io/vision.pdf#page=33
But my mental model of running a search engine was that it is a data/bandwidth intensive operation, not CPU intensive, so I wonder how they get the index down to those workers?
I do agree that paying coin to federate out the crawling is neat, but I hope they have some kind of consensus applied to those results, too, lest one runs the risk of indexing search results mangled by any MITM (intentional or otherwise) applied to the jurisdiction of the crawling node
I certainly like that DDG is pushing for privacy oriented systems and services, but when I read things like the above, and the accompanied page, I become quite sceptical of them. They don't mention Firefox with uBlock Origin, nor do they mention Firefox's Enhanced Tracker Protection (IIRC you get asked if you want to enable on first start up).
However, I find it weird that in order to get on the waitlist, I have to install the Duck mobile app. That seems like an unnecessary complication. And it also excludes people who don't have an iPhone. (I'm not sure if there's a Duck browser for Android.)
If it somehow incorporates Apple Pay, I will switch. That is the killer feature that keeps me on Safari.
As for Apple Pay, we would love to add Apple Pay to both DuckDuckGo for Mac and iOS, but currently Apple does not expose the APIs to enable us to do so.
Vivaldi fits the use cases completely - you can keep it as simple or complex as you want. I don't want a browser which is "fast". I want one which works and supports specific general and niche use cases rolled into one.
I'm speculating here, but it sounds like the Windows version will also be the OS provided engine, which would be Edge, thus we're back to Chromium. Which is a shame considering the stink they make about it in this article.
On the app (the subject of this post), we are actually not forking any browser. From the bottom section on how it is built:
"DuckDuckGo for Mac does not fork Chromium (or anything else). Instead, we use the rendering engine that comes with macOS...We are building everything else from scratch. So beyond rendering, all the code is ours – written by DuckDuckGo engineers with privacy, security, and simplicity front of mind. This means we don’t have the cruft and clutter that has accumulated in browsers over the years, both in code and design, giving you a modern look and feel and a faster speed."
I love that users who value privacy have even more choices and flexibility.
Surely only the purveyors of political misinformation could disagree with this.
Ah, the preemptive "if you disagree with me you're spreading propaganda" tactic. Bold.
The funny part is how much your comment reveals about your own bias. Most other people can see it, but you yourself cannot. The exact thing you're accusing others of.
In fact I find the growing support for that frightening, given that the self-appointed arbiters of truth in corporate and social media have repeatedly, objectively been shown to be wrong, and from my personal perspective pushing a social and political agenda that is not my own.
I’m a big boy, I’ll decide for myself what counts as “misinformation” thanks very much.
[1] https://www.vox.com/recode/22981115/duckduckgo-free-speech-p...
Regardless, search engines have to rank content somehow. We need to stop throwing around "politics" when something doesn't fit your particular narrative.
But then they decided to determine for me what constitutes misinformation. I no longer trust duckduckgo.
