Gabriel Weinberg’s DuckDuckGo is taking aim at the desktop browser market, betting that default privacy-centric settings will provide safer alternatives to Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Chromium-based Edge browsers.
The upstart search engine company says it is building a desktop browser from scratch with the same privacy-enhancing defaults that makes the DuckDuckGo search engine popular with privacy advocates.
Weinberg, who co-founded DuckDuckGo in 2008 and expanded beyond search into email protection and mobile app tracking, said the new desktop browser will attempt to make things simple for confused web surfers.
“No complicated settings, no misleading warnings, no ‘levels’ of privacy protection – just robust privacy protection that works by default, across search, browsing [and] email,” Weinberg declared.
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Instead of forking the open-source Chromium, Weinberg said the company is building its browser around the OS-provided rendering engine. “This lets us strip away a lot of the unnecessary cruft and clutter that’s accumulated over the years in major browsers,” he added.
“It’s 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,” Weinberg added.
The move into the desktop market comes as DuckDuckGo sees growth in the mobile space with app downloads on both Android and iOS surging to power more than 100 million searches per day.
The company did not provide any technical details on the new browser or say when it would be available for desktop computers.
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