DuckDuckGo Launches Privacy Browser Super Desktop App

DuckDuckGo, the internet search engine company popular for its extreme privacy safe-to-use search engine of the same name is working on a desktop browser that should bring the same focus on avoiding being tracked to your entire web experience.

Over the years, DuckDuckGo’s success in its all-in-one privacy apps and extensions, mobile app, and search engine ranked it the most downloaded browsing app on Android in major markets.

Now in a new blog post, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg offers a glimpse at what the upcoming browser will look like and notes that we can expect it to perform the same way its browsing app does on mobile. Unlike with other browsers, DuckDuckGo for desktop won’t have any complicated settings, misleading warnings or “levels” of privacy protection. Instead, the company’s browser will feature robust privacy protection that works by default across search, browsing, email, and more.

According to the CEO, “Instead of forking Chromium or anything else, we’re building our desktop app around the OS-provided rendering engines (like on mobile), allowing us to strip away a lot of the unnecessary cruft and clutter that’s accumulated over the years in major browsers. With our clean and simple interface combined with the beloved Fire Button from our mobile app, DuckDuckGo for desktop will be ready to become your new everyday browsing app. Compared to Chrome, the DuckDuckGo app for desktop is cleaner, way more private, and early tests have found it significantly faster too”.

This year brought in a lot of improvements in DuckDuckGo. In July, the company rolled out an email protection service that says it will strip away any trackers attached to your emails. Last month, DuckDuckGo released a built-in tool App Tracking Protection feature for its beta mobile browsing app that’s supposed to block third-party trackers from its users. They added a “Fireproofing” prompt to the mobile app so you have the choice to keep certain sites logged in between burns, also a new setting to change font sizes on web content, simplifying the search bar (so there aren’t two search bars), and speeding up loading time on Android.

DuckDuckGo’s whole pitch is that it’s an extremely safe-to-use search engine and that you can search online without worrying about being tracked. They don’t store personal info or follow you with ads. According to the website, “We don’t track you. Ever”

DuckDuckGo’s products also offer site encryption. Plus, the Privacy Grade tells you if a site can be trusted before and after DuckDuckGo applies its Privacy Protection.

You don’t have to do anything to get this privacy features working. They’re all built-in and ready for you to take advantage of as soon as you start using DuckDuckGo. The privacy settings you can alter are minimal.

Finally, the browser is currently in a closed beta test on macOS, but a tweet from Weinberg hints that DuckDuckGo is getting it ready for Windows as well. There’s no word on when the desktop browser will become publicly available but we believe that in the coming year, much more improvements on its app and other channels will be available.