DuckDuckGo Browser Is Now Available For Macs

DuckDuckGo, the famous privacy centric search engine is now available as a standalone browser for Macs. It’s built using MacOS’ rendering engine just like Safari, which should allow it to function reliably. Google Chrome, which is based on the Chromium project, is built using a more complicated mechanism.

Besides using 60% less data than Chrome, DuckDuckGo is supposed to be faster too, which was made evident by the Motion Mark 1.2 benchmark. Ince it’s been designed from the grown up to reduce invasive tracking, it should speed up browsing and eliminate many everyday annoyances like cookie consent pop-ups. As default it uses the DuckDuckGo search engine that includes helpful tracker blocking features.

The new cookie pop-up protection is supposed to be quite effective (50% of sites for now, but the figure continues to grow) at safeguarding your activities while browsing online. There’s also support for the Fire Button, which is a one-click data clearing feature, email protection and various other privacy-focused features.

Smart Encryption helps you navigate the encryption (HTTPS) version of a website as often as possible. The browser’s tracker blocking also helps lower exposure to third-party corrupts that may want to access your data.

The new browser is said to be far more secure than the usual “incognito mode” that’s available with its mainstream competitors. It also has features like password management, tab management, bookmarks and several others. This will help users import data such as passwords from other browsers and browser extensions like 1Password or LastPass.

Since it is still in the beta stage, DuckDuckGo doesn’t support extensions, but the company is working to integrate this functionality into the system without compromising other aspects of the browser. You are free to provide feedback regarding the browser to the support team via the available reporting system. This will help iron out some of the creases ahead of time.

If you’d like to try the new browser, first you’ll need to join the private waitlist. The company is letting people off said list daily, so you probably won’t have to wait very long before being “let in”.

This is how you join the waitlist:

1. Download the DuckDuckGo mobile app (or update to the latest version)
2. Open Settings > DuckDuckGo for Desktop (in the “More from DuckDuckGo” section).
3. Click “Join the Private Waitlist.”
4. When you’re granted an invite code, you’ll get a notification from the app. The notification will take you to an invite
code and a link to the download page to be opened on your desktop/laptop.

The company is also developing a Windows version of this browser, which should be out soon. It too should incorporate the same features and functionality as its Mac counterpart. Support for Linux may take longer, because the company has chosen to focus on Mac and PC platforms for now.