DuckDuckGo started life as a search engine that respected your privacy, but now it's going far beyond that by developing a web browser to respect your privacy across the entire web.
Gabriel Weinberg, CEO and founder of DuckDuckGo, published a round-up blog post this week of what his company has achieved over the course of 2021. They include improvements to the DuckDuckGo mobile app, the introduction of Email Protection for free email forwarding and tracker removal, App Tracking Protection to stop trackers in other Android apps, and a new design with better results for the DuckDuckGo search engine.
The most interesting news comes at the end of the blog post, though. Weinberg reveals that a DuckDuckGo desktop web browser is being worked on, which he describes as "not a "privacy browser"; it's an everyday browsing app that respects your privacy because there's never a bad time to stop companies from spying on your search and browsing history."
Unlike other browsers, Weinberg decided against forking an existing project such as Chromium (like Microsoft did for the Edge browser). Instead, the desktop app will use the rendering engine provided by each operating system it runs on, so that should include Windows, macOS, and Linux. By doing so, Weinberg says the DuckDuckGo browser can "strip away a lot of the unnecessary cruft and clutter that’s accumulated over the years in major browsers."
It's the same approach taken for the DuckDuckGo mobile app, and it promises to offer a very slick experience, as well as allowing users to relax about their privacy being protected. There will also be a "Fire Button," which has become popular on mobile devices as a quick (and animated) way to clear all your tabs and browsing data with a single tap or click. And as for performance, the desktop web browser may only bel in early testing, but according to Weinberg it's already "significantly faster" than Chrome.