DuckDuckGo competes against Google Chrome, claims to work on a Built-in desktop browser

Search engine DuckDuckGo is planning to make its own desktop browser. It will have “robust privacy protection” by default, and it will be easy to set it up to do that. This is the company’s aim to help users regain control of their data security.

Recognised for its unique search engine, DuckDuckGo stresses user privacy and avoids personalised results in favour of more generic search results. Besides that, it has a mobile browser that comes with a lot of important privacy tools, such as the ability to delete all of your web history with a single tap.

One might assume that the new search engine from DuckDuckGo will have a direct or indirect challenge to the dominant search engine, Google. If you want to search for something, you can use its search service, but it also has a free email forwarding service that it says removes trackers from emails and protects personal email addresses. When it comes to desktop browsers, Google Chrome has a huge lead. Now the company is adding one of its own to its list of tools.

According to DDG CEO Gabriel Weinberg in a news update, the soon-to-be-released desktop browser will be a regular browser having hard-coded privacy protections instead of a “privacy browser”. As far as Weinberg is concerned, the browser will be able to protect your privacy by default on all websites and services.

Weinberg also said the new browser won’t be based on Google’s open-source Chromium project, which is used by Chrome, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, and many other popular browsers. In his opinion, avoiding Chromium will allow the company to escape most of the junk that has gathered in its codebase. And so the DuckDuckGo browser will use “OS-provided rendering engines” like on a smartphone over the Chromium browser’s Blink rendering engine. This, however, doesn’t seem clear but will dig deeper to find out how this will be implemented by the company.

Even more interesting, WebView2 on Windows runs on the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge to show websites in Windows apps. This means that the DDG browser will still have some ties to Chromium, even if only in a very indirect way. No matter what, Weinberg thinks that the DuckDuckGo browser will be a better choice than Chrome in the long run. According to the CEO, it will be “cleaner and way more private.”

No word yet on when the DuckDuckGo browser will be made available to the public, but considering how much attention it has been getting, that day will not be too far away.