Privacy-focused DuckDuckGo has officially launched its browser for Windows with advanced privacy tools that can eliminate spam, tracking, and YouTube’s algorithm. This means it allows its users to avoid advertisements and YouTube recommendations without opening private windows. The company has addressed some of the most critical privacy issues specific to WebView2, such as ensuring crash reports are not sent to Microsoft.
This is currently in beta, so you may encounter crashes or unexpected behaviour. It does offer more privacy protection by default than other browsers. For years, Brave has been another well-known privacy-focused browser that recently launched its Brave Search engine. It has been available for Mac, iOS, and Android for a while and uses the same underlying OS rendering API developed by DuckDuckGo.
On top of that, it is also capable of using the Blink rendering engine, which means it reports itself as Microsoft Edge on most header-scanning sites. In the near future, DuckDuckGo plans to make its browser open-source, like its previous extensions and apps.
Features of the DuckDuckGo Browser.
- Duck Player: It shows most YouTube videos without any privacy-invasive ads, and it also doesn’t recommend videos.
- Blocks DDG sites “above and beyond” other browsers, even including third-party tracker loading.
- Enforced encryption.
- Fire the button to close all tabs instantly.
- Cookie pop-up management: it automatically selects privacy options and hides “I accept” pop-ups.
- Email Protection: it uses an auto-forwarding duck.com address on web forms.
Other features such as Link Tracking, Referrer Tracking Protection, Embedded Social Content Tracking Protection, and Google-specific Web tracking protection are included on top of the browser. There are plenty of features in the pipeline to be released. While other browsers like Chrome and Edge require multiple extensions to achieve this level of protection, the DuckDuckGo browser offers such protection out of the box.
It is easy to switch from other browsers as it has a built-in password and bookmark importer. However, it cannot import browser data at this time. Although it does not support any extensions yet, they will be added in future updates. To offer more protection, the company has built-in fingerprint protection. All of the codes in the web browser have been written in-house.
DuckDuckGo claims to block pre-blocking trackers, resulting in 60% less data than Chrome. Additionally, it is built using Windows’ own rendering engine, which means it largely relies on Windows’ own updates to keep its users secure. DDG has a pretty interesting relationship with Microsoft and Bing for its search results and advertisements.
It is still in early development, which means it needs more features in comparison with major browsers. However, DuckDuckGo plans to add extension support in the near future. Features like password management, ad-blocking tools, Duck players, and other common extensions, along with features like tab pinning, HTML bookmark import, and password and bookmark syncing, are already built-in. DDG tests its browser on various hardware to ensure it runs as expected across all Windows hardware.
