Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo has offered a first look at its upcoming desktop “browser app”, which promises simple privacy settings by default. DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg detailed his desktop browser in a blog post recapping 2021 milestones, including 150 million downloads of his all-in-one privacy apps for iOS and Android and Chromium extensions. .
The executive tries to distinguish Brave’s Chromium-based desktop browser DuckDuckGo from Mozilla Firefox, saying it is not a “privacy browser.” Rather, it presents it as a browser that offers “robust privacy protection” by default and works for search, browsing, messaging and more.
“This is a daily browsing app that respects your privacy because there is never a bad time to stop businesses from spying on your search and browsing history,” he wrote. And to give some clues to the internals that underlie the desktop browser or the DuckDuckGo “app”, as it calls it, but it also leaves out a lot of details.
Gabriel Weinberg first indicates that the browser will not be based on Chromium, the open source project on which Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, Vivaldi and around thirty other browsers are based.
Chromium? No need, assures DuckDuckGo
“Instead of branching off from Chromium or whatever, we are building our desktop application around the renderers provided by the operating system (like on mobile), which allows us to get rid of it. ‘much of the unnecessary clutter that has built up over the years in major browsers,’ explains the latter.
It is not clear exactly which renderers provided by desktop operating systems it refers to, but it’s no trivial task to build a desktop browser without Chromium’s Blink renderer. Ask Microsoft, which launched its Chromium-based Edge browser last year. Apple, on the other hand, uses WebKit for Safari on the desktop and requires all browsers other than Safari on iOS, including Chrome, to use WebKit for iOS.
“MacOS and Windows now both offer website rendering APIs (WebView / WebView2) that any application can use to render a website. This is what we used to build our application on the desktop, ”explains DuckDuckGo.
From scratch
Microsoft’s implementation of WebView2 in Windows allows developers to integrate web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into native Windows applications. WebView2 on Windows uses Microsoft Edge as a rendering engine to display websites in these applications. “We are building the desktop application from scratch, around the rendering APIs provided by the operating system. This means that anything beyond just viewing websites (eg managing tabs and bookmarks, navigation controls, passwords, etc.
So, on Windows, DuckDuckGo browser rendering will be based on Edge / Chromium for Windows, and Safari / Webkit on macOS. DuckDuckGo management emphasizes that this is not a fork of Chromium. A clear example of a project bifurcation is the creation of Blink by Google, which used the open source code behind the WebKit rendering engine (which Google and Apple had previously maintained) and then built its own web rendering engine for Chromium.
“Compared to Chrome, the DuckDuckGo desktop application is cleaner, much more private, and initial tests have shown that it is also much faster! », Assures the company.
Source: ZDNet.com