For now, the browser’s distribution is limited. DuckDuckGo’s Mac app is being released as a beta version that people can access by signing up for a private waiting list through the company’s mobile app. Launching in beta means that DuckDuckGo can make changes and fix bugs before its full release. Currently, it appears that some common browser features are missing. There’s no bookmarks bar for easy access to saved sites or folders, but the company says it’s working on that. There’s also no way to get a detailed history list of all the sites you’ve visited. There are various ways to access your browsing history, including a privacy feed of previously visited websites and auto-completion when you start typing a previously visited site, but they don’t seem comprehensive.
DuckDuckGo desktop apps have been in development for some time. Burger-Lenehan says the company has been building the Mac app for more than a year and first began private testing with members of the public in October 2021. The company’s browser for Windows is in development at the same time, but production is behind the Mac version, Burger-Lenehan said, adding that it will be available “soon.”
DuckDuckGo for Mac joins a growing list of Chrome competitors. In recent years, browsers have built privacy features into their offerings — most notably blocking trackers, browser fingerprinting and ads that follow you around the web — to differentiate themselves from Google’s browser. Apple’s mobile apps Safari, Firefox, Vivaldi, Opera, Brave and DuckDuckGo block trackers to varying degrees (although Tor is considered the most private browser).
What perhaps sets DuckDuckGo’s app apart is the way the browser is built. The vast majority of alternative web browsers – including Microsoft’s Edge, Brave, Vivaldi and Opera – all use to some degree modified versions of Google’s browser codebase, Chromium, and its core browser engine, Blink. Mozilla’s Firefox is one of the few other browsers that doesn’t use this Google-created setting.
DuckDuckGo eschews Chromium and instead uses Apple’s WebKit rendering system, which renders the code into the web pages you see. “We wanted complete control over the code and the experience,” says Burger-Lenehan. That decision was made in part because adapting Chromium would have meant the browser would have inherited the “mess and mess” of Google’s design process, Berger-Lenehan says. Instead, “every piece of code is owned by DuckDuckGo and written by DuckDuckGo.”
