DuckDuckGo’s New Web Browser’s Best Privacy Features

Hard to convince people to change, especially hard to switch Web browser. Whatever you like, whether it’s his Chrome, Edge, Safari, or dozens of other options on the team. DuckDuckGo has their work cut out for them if they want users to jump on the new macOS browser, but they have some clever privacy-advocate arguments. Drop Chrome at the end.

The company’s Mac browser has been in closed beta for some time, but as of today it’s open in beta. Anyone running macOS can download the app From the official website of DuckDuckGo Try out the company’s new privacy features.

What DuckDuckGo’s browser can offer Mac users

The whole feature of DuckDuckGo surrounds user privacy, so that’s where the browser’s primary functionality lies. One of the highlights is email protection, which gives you a @duck.com email address that you can always use if you don’t want to pass on your primary address. That @duck.com account forwards all messages to your primary email, giving you the best of both worlds. The feature has been available since his August, but is built into the macOS browser.

Without a doubt, one of the attractive features is the duck player. This is a YouTube player created by DuckDuckGo that blocks cookies and targeted ads and automatically uses most privacy settings provided by YouTube. DuckDuckGo can only promise that targeted ads will be blocked, but it also claims that Duck Player should generally duck most ads. I’d say that’s been my experience so far.

You can choose to use Duck Player for each video or make it the default every time you click a YouTube link. It supports features such as captions and his 4K resolution video, but the player must be closed to see YouTube-specific elements such as comments.

Another promising feature is automatic cookie popup handling. Whenever a website alerts you to choose your cookie settings, DuckDuckGo’s browser automatically selects the strictest privacy option. I support this method 100% as it can be frustrating to constantly choose cookie settings on new websites.

Password manager integration is limited at this time, but DuckDuckGo’s goal for future browsers. For now, it’s just DuckDuckGo’s own password manager (including autofill and payment information), full Bitwarden support, and integration with 1Password’s universal autofill.

All browsers have an option to clear history and data, but DuckDuckGo’s option is built into a browser window button called the fire button. From here you can choose to clear the data attached to the current tab or clear all tabs in the current window. However, because cookies are required to keep you logged in to websites, certain sites can be listed as “fireproof”.DuckDuckGo saves cookies so you don’t have to type in your username and password every time you start a new session.

Currently not on DuckDuckGo a Perfect History of privacyEarlier this year, we learned that a syndication deal between companies allowed Microsoft trackers to track users on iOS and Android browsers. Fortunately, it is no longer, so you shouldn’t run into these issues with DuckDuckGo’s macOS browser. Controversy aside, it’s refreshing whenever a tech company strives to protect data instead of siphoning it for profit. The app is still in beta and the Windows version is locked in closed testing. So there is a lot to do.