DuckDuckGo's New Browser Hopes Privacy Will Make You Dump Chrome

Following the popularity of its mobile app, DuckDuckGo has announced that it wants to bring its privacy-focused browser to desktop users. The company announced the desktop browser in a post looking back on the things it accomplished throughout 2021.

Chief among those accomplishments was the release of an all-in-one privacy browser. The app is available on Android and iOS, and it offers a complete browsing experience alongside some other notable features like tracker blocking and search improvements that protect your private data. The app also includes what DuckDuckGo calls the Fire Button, which erases all of your browsing history, cookies, and tracking data with a single button press.

2021 was a year of milestones for the company. DuckDuckGo previously celebrated a search milestone at the start of the year; it says the app is currently one of the most downloaded apps on the Google Play Store and is only second to Chrome on the iOS App Store. The company also said that it currently averages over 100 million searches a day and a recent survey showed that 9% of Americans (over 27 million) use DuckDuckGo to search on the web.

The desktop app that DuckDuckGo is working on will include all the features it already offers in its mobile app, including several new features currently in beta testing like App Tracking Protection, which blocks third-party trackers from apps like Google and Facebook.

Another part of the significant changes that the DuckDuckGo desktop app will offer includes an updated search results page. The company says that it has improved the way its page looks and works to provide a more simplified and refined search engine for people to use. In addition, DuckDuckGo says that it wants to "redefine user expectations of everyday online privacy."

It hopes to do this by offering an in-depth set of privacy protection features that work by default in your searches, your regular browsing, your email, and more. The company says it wants to step beyond just delivering another "privacy browser" and instead offer an app that respects user privacy in all aspects of your online usage.

The desktop app is currently in development, and DuckDuckGo says it isn't using Google's Chromium engine as other browsers have done in the past. Instead, it will use the OS-provided rendering engines to create an app that works without a bunch of unnecessary clutter. The company says that early tests are promising and that the app has already proven significantly faster compared to Google Chrome.