DuckDuckGo is launching a beta version of the browsing app for Mac which supports password management, tab management, bookmarks, and more, while still maintaining its key objective. Ensuring that the user’s privacy is maintained while browsing. It is set to provide users with a seamless and uncomplicated user experience. They also announced that DuckDuckGo for Windows is underway.
The app will help shield users from invasive tracking and speeds up browsing. The app comes with an in-built “private search engine, powerful tracker blocker, *new* cookie pop-up protection on approximately 50% of sites (with that % growing significantly throughout beta), Fire Button (one-click data clearing), email protection, and more – all for free.” All these features are already enabled by default, which means that you will be protected from any compromises and setbacks from the onset.
The app is also “really fast” because it uses your device’s in-built website rendering engine and blocks trackers even before they load. Through the blocking of trackers, DuckDuckGo uses less data compared to its rivals. It is also secure, in that it ensures that users get to navigate to the encrypted (HTTPS) version of a website thanks to the in-built Smarter Encryption. Furthermore, sensitive information such as bookmarks and passwords are stored locally, thus, reducing your exposure to risk.
DuckDuckGo for Mac does not fork Chromium (or anything else). Instead, we use the rendering engine that comes with macOS, which is created by Apple and the same rendering engine Safari uses. By building off the macOS rendering engine, our browser should also be most compatible with the Mac system (the same as Safari). Technically, we don’t have to “fork” any code to do this – we just call an API provided by macOS.
Everything else they use is built from scratch which translates to the fact that they have completely cut down the extra weight that has been flooding browsers over the years both in code and design. It will be interesting to see how everything pans out once the app reaches general availability. They also highlighted that they would like to support Linux but they are mainly focusing on Mac and Windows which is set to be released later this year.
