DuckDuckGo Announces New Privacy-Focused Web Browser for Mac

DuckDuckGo, the oddly-named privacy-focused search engine, already offers web browsers for iOS and Android, as well as browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. But on Tuesday, the company announced that it would work with desktop browsers as well. DuckDuckGo for Mac is available starting today as an invite-only beta that is “designed to be used as an everyday browser that really protects your privacy.”

Among other features, DuckDuckGo says that its browser will automatically manage “many sites”cookie consent pop-ups, that it will use encrypted HTTPS connections whenever available, and that the browser will block trackers and allow you to clear the saved website. site data. The browser also includes its own password manager that can import data “from other browsers and browser extensions such as 1Password or LastPass”. Private syncing of passwords and bookmarks across browsers is a planned feature but is not available in this initial release.

Most alternative browsers are based on Google’s Chromium browser and the Blink browsing engine, so they can benefit from Chrome’s dominance in the browser market. Most web pages are tested with Chrome in mind, and Chrome has a large and well-maintained library of browser extensions that third-party browsers can usually plug into without making any changes. Instead, the DuckDuckGo browser uses the Apple WebKit rendering engine via the WKWebView API.

Because it uses the built-in Mac browser engine instead of a native fork, the DuckDuckGo browser engine will receive feature and security updates when macOS is updated. This will likely save work for the DuckDuckGo team, who won’t have to do their own testing or update every time a change is made to WebKit. But this means that the DuckDuckGo browser running on different versions of macOS may have feature or security differences that DuckDuckGo can’t do much about other than encourage people to upgrade their Macs.

Using WKWebView also means that the DuckDuckGo browser cannot use browser extensions built for Safari. The announcement post talks about this, stating—perhaps correctly—that the most popular browser extensions are content blockers and password managers, and that these features are already built into the browser. But browsers from Microsoft Edge to Vivaldi offer both privacy-focused features and full compatibility with a huge number of Chrome extensions, so it’s hard to ignore this limitation.

DuckDuckGo says a Windows version of the browser is “coming soon.”Assuming the company takes the same approach to its browser engine for Windows as it does for Mac, the Windows version will use Microsoft Edge WebView2 as its viewing engine, meaning that the Mac and Windows versions of DuckDuckGo browser will have a common name. and some features, but will be completely different under the hood.