Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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.

Wish they had built off Firefox.

Is it yet another chrome engine client?

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?

While the browser on Desktop is a neat idea, it's not for me. I do use the mobile app alongside Firefox and Fennec though.

I'll happily carry on using DDG search on both platforms, since I'm not giving Google unnecessary details about my online habits... and oh yes, the dark mode.

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

I'm a Firefox user for life but I do appreciate these simpler alternatives. They allow older and less technologically literate people to regain some level of privacy online.

Right now using brave and presearch.

I know this is a Windows release but I guess for my limited use 2 cents with DuckDuckGo (DDG) browser for macOS:

• It is enjoyable and quick to use.

• No extensions but with its protections feature, there are no ads?

  • However, compared to Firefox with my extensions setup, vanilla YouTube on DDG is way more crowded and distracting.

• Duck Player plays YouTube videos without trackers and ads.

  • But it does take you to another page. No biggie for me though.

• Haven't used its fire proofing feature yet (a white list for saved accounts/passwords to prevent being cleared after using the Fire button feature)

Now, I wouldn't use it as my main daily driver. That's still Firefox, most probably because of my custom firefox css, bookmarks, and extensions setup (especially containers).

But I do use DDG browser once in a while, I guess to just have that fresh feeling of trying the new shiny thing (or just something out different from the regular daily routine). I use it almost like a tor browser-lite, after every session I'm done with using DDG, I click the Fire button/"Clear browsing history".

Might try it for an extended trial for some tasks but I'm using it to exclusively browse the federated communities and as an article reader for focus to mentally separate from the multi-tasking, less than 50 total tabs, hell that is Firefox at the moment.

I really like Marginalia.