Now DuckDuckGo is building its own desktop browser | Hacker News Reader

Now DuckDuckGo is building its own desktop browser

zdnet.com

269 pointswaldekm167 comments

Instead of building another Chromium-based browser, I’d love to see if it were possible for Mozilla and DuckDuckGo to form a partnership that potently helps both firms. I’m concerned we will end up with a monolithic browser stack controlled by Google unless Firefox gains more adoption and support. I believe multiple parties and players help us build a more open and standards based web.

I use Firefox as my daily driver primarily for privacy concerns and control, and secondarily to avoid monolithic browser stacks controlled by Google. Firefox isn’t perfect, but I enjoy the experience and have no issue browsing the web with it.

It’s not (necessarily) Chromium:

> "Instead of forking Chromium or anything else, we're building our desktop app around the OS-provided rendering engines (like on mobile), allowing us to strip away a lot of the unnecessary cruft and clutter that's accumulated over the years in major browsers," explains Weinberg.

The OS-provided rendering engine is Chromium's engine on Android and Windows, and Safari's on iOS and macOS.

"Safari" refers to the browser app built on top of the WebKit engine. Browsers on iOS use the WebKit engine (and not the Safari browser itself).

The same engine (WebKit) is available on all Apple platforms. One can also build a desktop browser on top of WebKit like DuckDuckGo suggests it may do on macOS. This approach has a tremendous advantage for solid platform integration and allows them to focus on building a good user experience (and, in this case, secure* good user experience).

WebKit is also fully usable on other platforms too, but I seldom ever reach for it unless I'm forced to by the OS.

> This approach has a tremendous advantage for solid platform integration and allows them to focus on building a good user experience

It basically only lets them do a bit more than skinning it. No deep plugin architectures like you see with Android Firefox, allowing real ad blockers.

WebKit is just the part that renders web content. Browser makers are free to include plugin functionality in their implementation if they want to, including content blockers like ad-block, fancy tab and theme functionality, etc.

It is also possible to extend the content blocking feature, so it also works in Safari itself through a regular web plugin or a content blocker extension. DuckDuckGo offers the "DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials" plugin for iOS and macOS, blocking all kinds of trackers.

That's the limited blocker stuff you can do on iOS safari, you can't block as deeply as ublock origin and others.

Yes, I’ll admit that part of the article is was a bit unclear to me. On iOS for example, you have to use Safari as your rendering engine. Chrome, Firefox, and any other browser ultimately us that on iOS. Android the os-provided rendering engine is Chromium. For desktop OSes I didn’t get the impression that they’re building their own rendering engine and at this point it would be a hefty engineering effort to do so. My assumption is that Chromium would be the underlying technology most commonly employed here.

One can use WKWebView on MacOS as well as iOS.

How they will support Linux is a mystery.

Probably depends on the GUI framework they're using. QT uses Chromium for its QtWebEngine. I think that would be one of the most sensible choices to achieve cross platform support.

lynx

Sounds like no Linux release then..?

It could just use qt’s or gtk’s native renderer.

That takes a small fraction of the dev time than a complete browser though, so it doesn’t really help the very chrome-centric landscape.

So could Google just put spyware (sorry "telemetry") in the rendering engine?

Well it's open source so they can just rip it back out as well, that's what brave does.

> "Don't use X! Use Y instead!"

> I believe multiple parties and players help us build a more open and standards based web.

How is choosing Firefox over Chromium going to help in that regard? And why do you think Chromium is a monolithic browser stack by Google? How is it monolithic? I see plenty of "Chromium parts" forked and used in different environments on their own all the time. Blink, V8 or mixed combinations like CEF ... Also what makes you think it's "controlled by Google"? You say you want more open standards, but funnily enough Mozilla is one of those ignoring most new widely adopted and open standards because of ... well, some developer simply doesn't want Firefox to support it. See the "Web Serial API" for example.

> How is choosing Firefox over Chromium going to help in that regard?

Chromium is absolutely dominant in that space, since basically all major browsers except Safari and FF are based on it. Creating your own stack is hardly an option and Safari isn't forkable, so if you don't want to support the near-monopoly of the Chrome browser stack Firefox is the only option.

Now, I do agree that FF made some very questionable decisions recently, but so did Chrome (see Manifest v3) and the way it's going right now, we'll have yet another Internet Exporer-like scenario on our hands soon.

Internet explorer was proprietary. Bad analogy.

It's still mostly controlled by a single company. The fact that it's open source makes the situation a tad better, but it's still a lot of power and network effect centered on a single entity.

Didn’t Google fork WebKit to make Chrome? If I remember correctly, the first few versions of Chrome were actually fully WebKit.

Yes, I guess by "Safari isn't forkable" he means the GUI application, but WebKit itself is definitely open-source and has been forked before (and is itself a fork of KHTML).

Indeed, that's what I meant. You can fork WebKit, but you don't start out with a working browser, like you would when forking Firefox or Chromium.

Precisely the last thing we need is more ads and unwanted features in Firefox.

The best is the furniture maker splash screen.

My wife says what does it have to do with the internet. I told her Mozilla has conflicting priorities.

DDG has been very lightweight with regard to user experience. And they actually have to, otherwise, they couldn't distinguish themselves from the competition (ie. Google). So there's no realistic risk of invasiveness.

WRT the features: Firefox needs market share above all. I'm actually terrified by a future where companies can't be bothered to put even a minimal effort to make a website/service run acceptably on Firefox. Try to use Slack on it, and you'll see what I mean.

"Firefox has been very lightweight with regard to user experience. And they actually have to, otherwise, they couldn't distinguish themselves from the competition (ie. Google). So there's no realistic risk of invasiveness."

> I'm actually terrified by a future where companies can't be bothered to put even a minimal effort to make a website/service run acceptably on Firefox

This isn't the future unfortunately. This is the present.

Future? As a webdev I don't remember having to check if something works on Firefox since probably 7-8 years at least. Userbase is too small to justify allocating resources.

Too small? According to this site [1], market share is about equal to Safari and Edge+IE. If you are supporting Safari, Edge/IE there is no justifiable reason not to support Firefox.

[1] https://kinsta.com/browser-market-share/

Lots of devs (the ones I work with, anyway) don’t even test in Safari until you point out it’s broken in it.

Really feels dev culture has regressed since the early chrome/safari days where working in multiple browsers was seen as priority.

I never did when I was maintaining an embedded web app. I checked in Chrome and Firefox. I would go in and figure it out if someone reported a bug in Safari but mostly no one at the company used Safari so it was really not tested for and the app just was never meant to run on mobile at all so safari wasn't much of concern.

I use Chrome for everything. I have 27 plug-ins running right now. But if Manifest 3 turns out to be as bad as predicted, I’ll abandon ship for Firefox without a second thought.

If you use Chrome, aren't you sending all your data to google directly? Can any number of plugins ensure your privacy?

use brave or ungoogled chromium (search for it on github) shall stop that.

Lol no you aren't "sending all your data to google". Come on man, certainly they spy on you but all your data is a bit of a bogey man story.

Im curious what plugins you use. 27 seems to be a lot.

Here's a partial list:

  - Dark Night Mode

  - FireShot

  - Force Background Tab

  - Google Docs Offline

  - Google Mail Checker

  - Hacker News Enhancement Suite

  - Image Downloader

  - Instapaper

  - LastPass

  - Linkclump

  - Popout for Youtube

  - Privacy Badger

  - Read Aloud

  - Reader Mode

  - Reddit Check

  - Reddit Enhancement Suite

  - ReviewMeta

  - Send from Gmail

  - Tampermonkey

  - The Camelizer

  - uBlock Origin

Revive servo, and call it drust.

Another one byte the drust quick song ala winamp on first launch.

Mozilla is not altruistic enough like that to turn off Google funding into their org. This is a company that’s trying to sell VPN subs for god’s sakes, like every other mom-pop vpn shop. These cats need that Google money and could give two fucks about seriously competing with them.

How do mozilla receiving money for a setting which is literally on the first page of the settings page and is directly available from the url bar and you can set it with like 2 clicks causes you any problem? Are you donating money to mozilla in exchange for something? Or are you helping out with the code?

Monolithic browser controlled by Google is already the case, the corpse of firefox is being dangled about "Weekend at Bernies" style so they can pretend they don't control the web.

Chromes dominance is not going to be changed outside of government action.

> Chromes dominance is not going to be changed outside of government action.

This is because business tactics rather than technical or product ones are the reason for their domination.

While I love technologies, it's so important to focus on the things outside of the tech itself at times.

Tbh a lot of the tech is business tactics. Pumping so much stuff into the browser makes it an impossible task just trying to maintain feature parity nevermind compete on quality.

Building out a high quality subset is not viable, the second your browser stops working with Amazon or Ebay or whatever else your browser is finished.

> Pumping so much stuff into the browser makes it an impossible task just trying to maintain feature parity nevermind compete on quality.

To compete or gain a market doesn't mean you need to have all the features. Doing things differently can and does work. The more I read books like Competing Against Luck and The Design Of Everyday Things the more I'm able to see it and even work on projects that do that.

> the second your browser stops working with Amazon or Ebay or whatever else your browser is finished

This is why standards are so important. Why it's important to have Firefox and Safari in the marketplace. Apple using Safari on iOS and iOS large market helps keep the standards ecosystem in check with Chromes dominance.

The lack of modern tech communications standards is causing problems for consumers. While I don't always like the HTML, CSS, and JS specs... the fact that we have specs and multiple implementations is a benefit to people who want to try and compete.

When it comes to a platform which’s only redeeming quality is that it is a standard, then not following that standard is quite dump in my opinion.

>> Chromes dominance is not going to be changed outside of government action.

Well not with that attitude.

What do you propose instead of government action? Turning up as a crowd with pitchforks outside of the Google HQ?

People start using firefox?

People SHOULD do a lot of things but ultimately distribution wins. If IE comes with OS, they'll use it. It's similar to people using windows or whatever OS is by default.

This is assuming quite a few things:

1. We the people are completely unable to use the power of market forces to come up with an alternative and supplant the established market leader

2. The government will regulate this in a way that is better than the alternative

3. That lobbying forces and the general corruption that is widespread in D.C. won't impact that in any negative way.

4. That big tech companies aren't experts in skirting regulations or that Google doesn't already have a plan B if something happened to one of their moats.

Re: point number 1 - market forces can't fix lack of DRM support in a browser made completely from scratch. Even Spotify, and sometimes news sites ask to enable EME now (which I refuse out of principle). A brand-new browser already got squashed by Google's refusal to allow Widevine modules to run on said browser, and if DRM becomes a commodity solution, it's goodbye to the open market of web browsers.

But you just said the crux if the issue: you refuse out of principle, but that doesn't mean others share your principles.

Why did Google's refusal squash a brand new browser? Why was it even a factor? Did it have to be? Is there an alternative approach one could take to not need google's involvement to include a Widevine module in their said brand-new browser?

My refusal to allow EME content is entirely my own decision, and irrelevant to the point I'm trying to make.

My point was that DRM (EME) support is becoming an expectation, and you are outright locked out from certain EME schemes like Widevine unless you're a "blessed" browser (which you can't be, yet - by definition, you're too small to enter any meaningful communication with a large player, as the browser I mentioned found out).

> Why did Google's refusal squash a brand new browser? Why was it even a factor? Did it have to be?

Said browser (Metastream [0]) was meant to build a different experience for watching video streams together, potentially including DRM-ed sources. Widevine allegedly has a 70% market share, so the refusal really was a big deal and a deal-breaker for the intended vision of the browser.

> Is there an alternative approach one could take to not need google's involvement to include a Widevine module in their said brand-new browser?

What do you propose, beyond technical workarounds that can cease working at any time? I imagine that there may be a risk of invoking the DMCA or lawsuits, whether wrongful or not (might makes right after all, and Google has the deeper pockets here)

The right way to do this is to engage into a DRM licensing process, which is a fundamentally business-based one. And when you're small and dealing with a stubborn large business, there's no right to appeal their decision.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19553941

Market forces generally cannot stop a monopoly without government interaction. It's simply too powerful. They either buy upstarts or sue them into destruction in court. The only other way is if technology has a huge shift and the monopoly can't keep up before an interloper comes in and disrupts. That doesn't look to be happening anytime soon. I only see "Web3" and "Metaverse" and neither of those really spark joy in most people.

Chrome does not even come close to meeting the definition of a monopoly. Google is not "unreasonably restraining competition" nor is it even selling its browser.

Besides that point, you have to be keen to distinguish between a situation where there is just a clear market winner versus a company attempting to monopolize, e.g. do people just prefer to use Chrome at the end of the day? Most internet users today are aware of Microsoft's browser. Almost all millennials and under are additionally aware of Firefox. The definition of monopoly isn't just "people choose to use this product in lieu of others" but something closer to "people are forced to use this product in lieu of others" or "people have no other choice than to use this product"

Google goes out of their way to make their websites only work well in Chrome (and Safari, somewhat).

This killed the original non-chromium Edge. Not sure if it fits a monopoly definition but it is definitely not good behaviour.

A lot of people won't think outside of the box and see that the definition of monopoly has to evolve with the times. It's not the early 1900's any longer, big tech is redefining the way we need to address lots of things.

The CURRENT_YEAR fallacy is never a convincing argument, but especially not here considering the last significant anti trust action was one taken out against Microsoft for very related things.

We've had "Big Tech" and monopolizing actions amongst them for a while now.

Parent is right though. We didn’t have global tech empires with that kind of leverage at the time the monopoly laws were created. By spreading a browser for free, Google gains control in many subtle ways that eventually lead to revenue. That is definitely dangerous, although it doesn’t fit a classical monopoly.

Reason for crypto popularity is mostly due to financial upside. If you remove that, web3 or crypto will fail

if you look at the stats in the US, chrome is slightly less than 50%, safari has a much bigger slice of the pie (with edge a wee bit more popular than the worldwide trend)

I agree, though I think your characterization isn't entirely fair.

Firefox might have become irrelevant in terms of market share, but it's far from being a "corpse", if you meant anything by that outside of the "Weekend at Bernie's" analogy. It works quite well, its extensions are far less likely to get totally nerfed for the purpose of showing ads, and it even still develops features before Chrome does.

It's definitely being dangled out there for the sake of excusing Google, but it also seems like someone's seriously holding it back. The Servo debacle was pretty inexcusable. Servo of course still exists under the Linux Foundation, but we'll be lucky if we ever see it mean anything to Firefox or become anything other than a curiosity.

> Chromes dominance is not going to be changed outside of government action.

Is it the dominance of 'Chrome' or 'Chromium'. I see 'Chrome' as Google's official product, 'Chromium' though seems to have become a boilerplate in recent years for kickstarting your own browser, and I don't know how I feel about this.

On the one hand Google is already a monopoly in the browser space, because we have gone from "Browser Wars" to "Engine Wars" where 3 distinct browsers (Edge, Chrome and Brave) all running the same tech from Google.

On the other hand I see this as a major service Google has done to help everyone in web development. In a way this engine monopoly has made things much easier, I no longer care if you're running Chrome, Edge, Brave or some other V8 based browser, I know I will see a consistent experience across those browsers. And while part of me is fearful or this shift, another part of me is like "so what". So what if Chromium is a dominant browser "core", it's OSS and though Google has major influence, it's still OSS.

Chrome (not Chromium) has something like 63% global market share. I'm not sure Brave, with its ~1%, is worth talking about unless you're also talking about Vivaldi and Opera and every niche browser that exists.

Sincerely, a happy Brave user.

> Chromes dominance is not going to be changed outside of government action.

Heard this once already when the song was about IE6.

And it was true

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....

IE6 post-dates the conclusion of this lawsuit, and held ~90% of browser, not desktop browser, but browser market share for the better part of the next decade.

What changed? Firefox was released, Safari was released, and quite a bit later, Google Chrome was released, but it would still be a while before IE6 would lose its dominance even once IE7 was released.

Key differences between this situation and IE6/7:

1. IE6/7 were just egregiously bad experiences for both users and developers, with Microsoft being almost entirely disinterested to the point of disbanding their browser team. Holding the web back was clearly part of their strategy.

2. Chrome, on the other hand, is well-maintained and rather good. Unlike Microsoft in the 2000s, the web is a core pillar of Google's business. Any challenger to the throne will have to overtake a moving target powered by a world-class engineering powerhouse, rather than a static dinosaur like IE6/IE7.

3. The barrier to entry in the browser market today is roughly an order of magnitude greater than it was back then. Browsers today are far more complex; they're more like operating systems.

As far as the free market is concerned, nobody is seriously challenging Chrome in this area. Ever. Unless/until Google loses interest and stops competing.

All of your criticisms of IE6 are fair and on point, but if you recall IE7 was Microsoft putting the gang back together again and trying to put some effort in again. Still not a great browser, but still a marked point where they abandoned their abandonment of Internet Explorer as a project.

Google also originally piggy backed on WebKit to build their browser. The JavaScript runtime was homegrown, but Google worked within WebKit before forking out of there. My guess is when Google Chrome is eventually overtaken, it will be by another Chromium-based browser under similar circumstances.

The web also isn’t just desktop browsers anymore. It’s much harder to make the case that Google Chrome is the only major browser of concern with MobileSafari running around, and per Apple’s policies, WebKit the only useful browser engine on iOS and iPadOS.

    The web also isn’t just desktop browsers anymore. It’s much
    harder to make the case that Google Chrome is the only major 
    browser of concern with MobileSafari running around, and per 
    Apple’s policies, WebKit the only useful browser engine on iOS 
    and iPadOS.

Yeah and, perhaps I'm giving them too much credit for strategy/foresight, but it feels like this all plays precisely into Google's hands.

There is just enough competition, and Google's web apps are just functional enough on Webkit/Firefox, for Google to sail clear of accusations of monopoly.

Well, not sure what to tell you mate. You can make the case that Google Chrome is a monopoly that should be brought to heel by the Law, under new legislation if necessary, or you can’t.

Again, I don’t even particularly like Google Chrome, but do you know the only reason I keep a Chromium-based browser installed at all is? Government websites. Not Chrome though, currently it’s Brave with all the crypto stuff turned off. I don’t even need one for anything else. To the extent that Google Chrome is entrenched, it’s the same entities whose powers you mean to bring to bear on them helping them stay entrenched.

Some of us feel trepidation about Chrome being 'too big to fail' simply because Google has demonstrated itself to be capricious and fickle in terms of continued support for products. One only has to glance at killedbygoogle.com to see a pattern of rather arbitrary decisions to kill various things. If for any reason Google decided to kill off Chrome, it would be nice to have an alternative to fall back upon.

The web is 10x more complicated now. Firefox's challenge was being bug-compatible with IE, but the challenge now is replicating the entire browser runtime.

Does the web being 10x more complicated mean that 1. Google Chrome, which full disclosure: isn’t my browser of choice, deserves the same end as Internet Explorer? And 2. That the government is the means by which it should be brought to heel?

I mentioned this in another comment, but Google Chrome originally piggybacked on WebKit, homegrown JS runtime aside, before forking out of there. I think there’s a decent chance that the same could happen to Google via another Chromium-based browser. Just because it’s not immediately apparent how Chrome will lose its dominance today doesn’t mean it won’t ever happen. Nor does that mean it should. People actually like Chrome. I used to like Chrome, and it’s easy to see how people with a different set of priorities than mine still do.

The old song was about IE6, and today’s song is about Google Chrome. The lyrics might be different but it’s still the same old song.

I don't want to see Chrome (and Chromium) die, I merely want to see other browser engines flourish. Heck, even Trident, if we could turn back time and have Explorer become a good web citizen.

My problem with Chrome dominance is that it's both a dominance of a single company (since Chrome is by far the dominant "fork" of Chromium, and owned by an advertising corporation), and a dominance of a single browser engine. The latter is IMO a really big threat, as it leads to browser engine monoculture. Monoculture leads to a single point of failure, and in this case, a loss of knowledge about how to build a browser engine that's "the websites that are actually out there"-compliant. Much more relies on the web now, so it's paramount that we have a useful alternative browser engine implementation.

Sure, but what’s the original sin at work here? Google investing their time and resources into their browser projects, or the fact that web became this complex mess because web developers beat the drum for 15 going on 20 years that the web should be an app runtime?

Duplicating an app runtime feature for feature and bug for bug is difficult in a capital intensive sort of way. Even companies that can afford the expenditure, primarily Microsoft, decided to get out of that game because that level of expenditure comes with its own opportunity costs even at their level.

And there are alternatives: WebKit and Mozilla, one of those is the exclusive web renderer for iPhones and iPads which is not an insignificant amount of hardware in the world.

Google puts the work in. It’s really just that, and it’s their private prerogative to put that work in if they so choose, where others choose not to. The diversity of rendering engines isn’t great compared to say 15 years ago, but it’s not so bad that it’s a total monoculture in the way IE6 was. Actually thinking about it, more people are using more and different browser rendering engines than back then because Chromium-based browsers don’t have the total dominance that IE6 did, and there’s a lot more people on the web than there used to be. We had diversity, but we’re talking iCab, pre-WebKit OmniWeb, Opera on Presto, and yeah, Trident’s not really around anymore, but it was there, and so was Gecko and WebKit.

At least you don’t need a browser that supports ActiveX controls for regular websites anymore.

I use FF every day and it works really well for my purposes. I do all of my daily desktop browsing in it and only open Chrome if I need to access an internal corporate web site on my work laptop. To me, FF isn’t a dangling corpse, it works well and it’s just not fair to the devs at Mozilla to make such a harsh statement.

Statcounter says that Firefox has about a 4% worldwide market share, compared to Chrome's 64%[1]. Assuming that the parent poster was talking about Firefox's quality instead of market share is more than a little presumptuous.

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

> I use FF every day and it works really well for my purposes

Good for you, but the problem is what many other people don't use FF in any way, even if it worked well for their purposes.

Hard to get adoption purely based on privacy. Privacy is a super hard sell

I respectfully disagree. If Mozilla can lessen its dependence on hush-money from Google, that is a /good/ thing. One may believe that Firefox/Gecko is an animated corpse, but it's the only realistic alternative to the Chromium ecosystem that we currently have. Other rendering engines are too obscure to matter and/or the hobbyist project of one person or at best a small team, including Palemoon and its ilk.

If Chromium works well and is open source, why does it matter?

The standard adoption might be pushed by Google only or at best by a limited group of developers working on chromium. Monopoly, even with open source is dangerous.

>> If Chromium works well and is open source, why does it matter?

Where's the source for the MS version of it?

Agreed, we already had discussion here about Gecko beeing used more in project I think there were a project for a Gecko based electron alternative.

That said I'm not sure what is the current state of Gecko and how it could be used easily in new project. I'm not even sure that's a goal Mozilla is pushing.

As much as I think Firefox is great as a project, if only because it's not Chrome. I think we could use more people entering the space with fresh ideas. A monoculture with just Firefox and Safari outside it is is still basically a monoculture. Plus Mozilla is pretty solidly captured by Google, sorry to say, that's where all of their revenue comes from, more or less. If Firefox actually started getting big market share tomorrow, Google could just pull the plug on them.

Mozilla needs Google's money to continue existing so I don't think that's going to happen.

Mozilla partnered with Yahoo just fine, so I don't see why it can't with DuckDuckGo.

The prevalence of chromium forks makes me wonder if there is something about the Firefox code base that makes it far less attractive to work with then chromium’s. Is it just raw features of the core engine? Or is there a bigger issue? I believe the chromium team does put some effort in helping even competing forks with technical issues.

I wonder Mozilla is unable to demonstrably provide support in this area?

I also use Firefox as my daily, but more and more software seems incompatible with it.

For instance, AWS EC2 Global View insists I switch away from Firefox, that's just one example, but there are more.

Anyone know why? I've always viewed Firefox as the de-facto standard, why the recent breakage? Why is it deemed acceptable, by AWS of all orgs?

Since it's got such a low market share, it's much easier to declare your website "not compatible with Firefox" than it is to test on Firefox, even though 99% of sites that claim they're not compatible with Firefox work perfectly as soon as you spoof your user-agent to WebKit.

I'm looking at AWS EC2 Global View now (on Firefox) and am seeing nothing about switching away from Firefox.

ok, interesting. I just checked, as of right now I still very much get the message "Unsupported Browser - In order to provide the best experience we require you use a different browser." So I'm not sure where our configurations differ.

Firefox 95.0.2 64-bit fwiw.

Perhaps Mozilla should create more paid coding positions rather than padding Mitchell Baker's purse. She's sucked a lot of the air out of that organisation.

> I use Firefox as my daily driver primarily for privacy concerns and control

I'd switch to Firefox in an instant if they would just make the multi-profile functionality a first class citizen instead of hiding it behind about:profiles.

It's a feature in Chrome that is hugely essential to my daily workflow and the current equivalent in Firefox has too many friction points to sway me at the moment.

I honestly think that some body like duckduckgo should fork firefox, hire as many firefox developers as possible and get seriously on track with developing a seriously better browser.

Firefox has been consistently getting worse in dumb ways, and the mozilla foundation seems to be interested in anything and everything but delivering a superior web browser.

It's very important to understand that, other than Blink, Gecko is incredibly hard to integrate into other software. That's why, for example, there is no Firefox-based Electron or Qutebrowser equivalent.

This is only due to the failure (and unwillingness) of Mozilla to build a truly modular, expandable browser.

Mozilla isn't even trying to compete with Google anymore at this point. They are only implementing new features into Firefox that Google has first built into Chrome (and firing developers working on features that could actually set Firefox apart from Chrome). Also, they are quick to implement most "features" Google implements, no matter how user-unfriendly it may be.

An example for this is Mozilla implementing Manifest V3:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/11/manifest-v3-open-web-p...

I just posted a top level comment before seeing yours, and basically I have started to think (with my obligatory tinfoil hat on) that it's not just the lack of vision on the part of Mozilla's board, but actually external influence and intentional sabotage which led to this.

The reason behind the nonexistense of firefox-based electron is mainly rooted in the fact that FIrefox does not offer any embedded framework like webkit did with webkit2gtk and chromium with CEF.

They used to have one, but just largely forgotten and abandoned.

>Also, they are quick to implement most "features" Google implements, no matter how user-unfriendly it may be.

>An example for this is Mozilla implementing Manifest V3:

I fail to see how "implementing manifest v3" is user-unfriendly. I can see how people think that way, because "implementing manifest v3" is being conflated with "removing blocking webRequest API". However, there really isn't any indication that mozilla is doing the latter. For instance, you could implement manifest v3 but still supporting v2, or drop v2 but still keep the blocking webRequest API as a vendor specific API. There are good reasons to do the former, to allow firefox to work with extensions built for chrome, so I don't see any issues with mozilla implementing v3.

The reason Mozilla is implementing Manifest V3 is to maintain cross-browser support for extensions. There are many extensions that will work just fine and not having the new APIs on Firefox would mean just loosing them. And I’m not saying this as a Google supporter, I hate them, but we have to be objective. Also, Firefox devs are pushing forward security with better and better site isolation, cookie isolation and now with RLBox. And if they implement more stupid features like themes, it’s totally fine. People complain if Firefox has a low market share and then complain again when they implement user-friendly design things.

> This is only due to the failure (and unwillingness) of Mozilla to build a truly modular, expandable browser.

Not on Android: https://geckoview.dev

This raises a few questions:

* Will this be open source?

* Will this support WebExtensions? Assuming they'll have to develop their own implementation since they are using the operating system's own rendering engines, so they will most likely have to have their own implementation.

* Will this allow ad-blocking and tracking protection? Once again, seems they will have to develop this feature themselves. Will the ad-blocking whitelist their own properties or does the user have granular control?

* Will this allow usage of other search engines within the browser, or are you locked in to DDG only? (Of course, ignoring actually navigating directly to the relevant search engines own website).

Interestingly enough, from their blog post[1]:

On macOS, Safari is probably the most anaemic "major" web browser out there. Interested to see how it compares to that. I'm not convinced a more minimalist browser compared to Safari is actually useful?

[1] https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-2021-review/

I interviewed for the position. (They regularly posted the position in the "Who's hiring" threads for awhile.)

It's going to be an extremely simple browser. Their strategy is to use the HTML rendering component built into each OS. The way I interpreted it was that they're trying to make a browser that's simple enough to develop with a small team, "good enough" for most people, and doesn't have every feature under the kitchen sink.

> Will this be open source?

Doubtful. It also doesn't "make sense" to open source, as they're basically using the same rendering engine as Edge / Safari, with a different UI around it.

(Side note: If you want something like this that's open source, it's probably easier to clone it than to fork it. Every few years I write an experimental browser based on these rendering engines, and I frequently come across "simple" open-source browsers that provide great examples of how to use these components.)

> Will this support WebExtensions?

No. They are building ad-blocking and privacy functionality into the browser. To paraphrase what they told me, most people only install ad-blocking and privacy extensions.

> Will this allow ad-blocking and tracking protection?

Yes, that is the major feature they are trying to build. They have extensive blacklists already, as they already ship privacy-focused plugins for Chrome. (Their take-home assessment involved using a well-known privacy list published on Github.)

> Will this allow usage of other search engines within the browser, or are you locked in to DDG only?

We didn't discuss that. This is speculation on my part, but I think their motivations are to "keep it simple" instead of offer every feature under the sun.

> Their strategy is to use the HTML rendering component built into each OS.

So sounds like they are not going the Chromium route. Many comments in this thread are pretty cynical on that point.

On Windows, the plan (when I interviewed) was to use C# and the new WebView2 (apologies if I got the name wrong) component.

Under-the-hood, it uses Microsoft's fork of Chromium in a separate process.

> To paraphrase what they told me, most people only install ad-blocking and privacy extensions.

Welp, zero interest from me then. And probably most others here as well.

I don't use Firefox from hatred of Google or even fear of monoculture. I use Firefox because that's where the enthusiast community is. All the cool stuff (Tree Style Tab, uMatrix) gets built for Firefox, not for Chrome. Firefox is currently retaining that group, in part because there's nowhere else for them to go. What I would like to see is a diversity of enthusiast browsers.

IMO: Sounds like a good reason to create an open-source browser that just re-uses the OS's rendering engine. Most of these features have very little to do with HTML rendering.

I can't imagine it not being open source. Closed source pushes any privacy assumptions that can be made to 0. Trying to pitch it as a privacy focused browser would be even more disingenuous than all the mainstream, open source, browsers that already try to make that claim. IMO, it would completely destroy all of DDG's credibility to even try to justify it.

To be fair, Chrome also started as a very simple browser that was "good enough" compared to IE6.

And Firefox was refreshingly light before it. All browsers are doomed to bloat or remain niche.

Unfortunate, but true. The people want the bloat!

The more I see how Mozilla does nothing to allow Firefox/Gecko/Servo to be a base for other browsers, the more I start to believe that it's not just a problem of not having it prioritized on their road map, but it's actually undue influence from outside the company.

It's impossible that in the 10 or so years since people manifested desires to have a way to embed a browser engine which is not Google controlled in applications, nobody at Mozilla actually realized how good of an idea that is for their popularity, influence, and why not, monetization capabilities.

> but it's actually undue influence from outside the company

I mean we’ve all seen how Mozilla execs behave. I’d say it’s likely an influence inside the company.

10 years or so? Try 20. https://web.archive.org/web/20000815063229/http://www.mozill...

Yeah, they used to support embedding. But it kept being under resourced, with bug reports and patches often being ignored.

From the official blog:

>Instead of forking Chromium or anything else, we’re building our desktop app around the OS-provided rendering engines (like on mobile), allowing us to strip away a lot of the unnecessary cruft and clutter that’s accumulated over the years in major browsers. With our clean and simple interface combined with the beloved Fire Button from our mobile app, DuckDuckGo for desktop will be ready to become your new everyday browsing app.

It seems they are making the desktop equivalent of Firefox Focus.

They're using OS provided rendering engines.

So Chromium based Edge Webview on windows, Webkit on Safari and what exactly on Linux ?

QTWebengine ? Gecko ? No linux support ? Who knows.

Lynx/links as a dependency. /s

Taking from Tauri [1], which tries to use native rendering engines too, it's WebKitGTK [2]. I thought that only OSX and mobile OS had an integrated rendering engine to call it native, though.

[1] https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri#introduction [2] https://webkitgtk.org/

Which isn't there outside GTK-based environments.

It's not like it can't be installed. I use KDE at home, but I have quite a few GTK apps installed.

You're joking right? GTK apps work just fine outside of "gtkbased environments". They have since the beginning. Some may not have the styling of their DE but they run just fine. I use Gimp and Meld all over the place, including on windows without any issues.

I think he mean that it's not preinstalled on not "gtk based environments"

this is also what epiphany (GNOME Web) uses for rendering.

There seems to be a growing consensus around the idea that alternative search engines aren't viable without their own browser. Cliqz (acquired by Brave), DDG (obviously successful by some metrics, but not a real threat to Google), Kagi (pops up from time to time here)[0]. Given that Google considers it worth tens of billions of dollars a year to remain the default on Apple devices and Firefox, the default search advantage is clearly quite important.

I'm not sold on the idea that convincing people to install a different browser will be easier than teaching them to install an extension or choose a different default search provider, but clearly the latter isn't paying off.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28799049

They are viable, but growth is significantly hindered by GOOGLE. When you install a search engine extension, that is explicitly labeled as such, Google will still "warn" users that an extention has "hijacked" their default search provider, and recommend to revert back. This is obviously anti-conpetitive but governments are too slow to react. Furthermore, extensions are at the mercy of extension stores' obscure policies, and are often dropped on a whim by "reviewers".

With that said, tens of millions of users is hardly "unviable". There are several profitable search engines.

I wish they'd focus on fixing the various things that have broken in their search over the last couple of years, like literal string searching and negation.

Thanks for confirming this, negation is screwed up somehow. I ended up using !g for redirection for google instead, when I need to negate.

But in general I think result quality went off the roof recently, while google's went down for me. I really find it more effective to search on ddg now, for any matter, technical and personal. Google still has a huge database of businesses and integration with maps is awesome, but that advantage is so small that I switch to google less then a few times a month.

The web really needs a truly cleansheet, non-invasive, open source browser written in a modern language. It’s disheartening to see the consolidation in the web space on Chrome. We need an alternative. There has to be someone who can counter Chrome’s dominance with a modern, fast browser engine.

(PS - I am and have been a Firefox user for many many years)

And I think you should stick to Firefox (just as I’ll do). It will be built on top of the system web view, so chromium on Windows and WebKit on macOS. It will be minimal and lack extensions, and I can’t imagine living without extensions. And if you don’t use any I recommend you to try some. I see no point in this browser, as it will basically be a Firefox Focus for desktop.

The web has become so overdesigned and complicated that I just don't see that happening. No open source group has the kind of funds to take on google. Firefox is barely in there but only just because they were around before google's engine became dominant and google gives them a half billion dollars a year.

If improving DDG - or any privacy respecting search engine - would require extra funding, I just want to say I would be happy to pay subscription fees for a good service.

Most people here probably know it, but for those who don't:

The key point 'Chromium fork vs. OS provided Webview' is somewhat non-relevant, because they aren't very different. Chromiums rendering engine 'Blink' is a fork of WebKit and most OS provided Webviews are either Blink or WebKit based.

The last major rendering engine that is different is Gecko/Quantum which is being developed by Mozilla for Firefox. Everything else is based on WebKit nowadays.

The only fun thing about the situation is that WebKit is a fork of KHTML which was developed by the KDE developers for their browser Konqueror for Linux.

The WebKit fork was a while ago and the two behave quite different.

A mix of Firefox , opera(I kinda like some features), safari without the proprietary issues and the chromium parts minus the tracking would be amazing.

Rooting for the team, everyone used to say it's too hard to create a new browser from scratch, the monopoly is too overwhelming etc.

But we got brave, at least it's something fresh. And it appears duck has generated money or investments for following googles path. Next they could go for an email client, a good copy of the Ms suite and a video platform and google might become dethroned some day.

They're not going to create a new browser from scratch, unfortunately.

> we’re building our desktop app around the OS-provided rendering engines

I'm skeptical that this will give them enough control to fully customize all browser behavior. The platform-provided browser engine APIs (WebKit, the new WebView2 on Windows) are designed for simple HTML embedding scenarios, not a full web browser. I struggled with this when developing a browser based on the IE engine several years ago. I think Electron would be a better bet. Does anyone disagree

I 1000% percent disagree. Firstly as a user I see no point in this browser at all. They should have partnered with Mozilla to stick to their commitment to privacy and to their effort to support open source projects.

Imho they don’t aim to customize the UX that much. They’ll build something like their mobile browser and push for their search engine, mail protection and whatever they’ll try to sell in the future. And we should just not trust them. So many people use browsers as they are (which I find impossible nowadays with all the ads and popups) and reading that DuckDuckGo magically protected them will be enough for them.

Instead of Electron they could have just used Chromium but that is ethically terrible and an un useful effort for them (given what I said about their intentions).

Alternative title: "DuckDuckGo is joining the band wagon and releasing another white labeled variant of Chrome"

Or you could read the article.

They seem to oversold "engine" things to the journalists, the article itself even states that it's simply a thin wrapper to WebViews aka Chromium/Webkit. Yes, it's not a fork, yet it uses only already available engines.

Btw it’s total non-news that they are building a browser. It’s just a repackaging of the existing OS browser control in a new GUI. So still Chromium / Edge behind the scenes on Windows.

The only thing that bugs me with ddg is that every search inquiry is being processed by improving.duckduckgo.com and it's not possible disable it in search options. You can do block it manually in few ways if you wish but I think that should be an option user can control, in an easy way.

I'm bit concerned how things may look like after Manifest v3 will arrive, when it comes to privacy, ads and tracking. Another Chromium-based browser? Why not, I won't mind it but everything comes to what Google does thru Chromium project people hands. And I don't think it can be anything else but Chromium - despite what he says. If not immediately then they later switch to it - just like Microsoft abandon EdgeHTML in favor of Chromium and Blink.

Can't wait to see what they offer I have been using Safari and Brave for quite some time now.

For work I use strictly Edge as it keeps everything from o365 together.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29316022

Yet another Google Chrome clone with privacy mods. How many of those we have already? Four? Five? Good job cementing Googleopoly of internet.

As much as I prefer DDG over Google in terms of search, and perhaps other services of DDG provided them, I'd beware of allowing them to take on the all-encompassing nature that Google imposes.

I can see it now... it's the year 2525 and there's DDG search, DDG browser, DDG email, DDG video chat, DDG social network... and they announce the addition of personalization features based on user behavior, restriction of ad-blocking for "helpful ads", and then they just get bought by Google anyway.

I always use this argument: If you wanted to make a big honey pot to collect people's data, how would you market it to get the most users? Exactly how DDG is marketed.

While there's no evidence of it happening, it's entirely possible they sell data to people on the hush hush.

that's kinda how most successful businesses work? you succeed in one area, move into another related area, repeat ad infinitum

Up to the point it reaches parity with Google, it's a win for users.

Would be cool if they, ya know, built a search engine first. They just serve bing results with a few sponsored things thrown in.

Couldn't find it in the article but I'm assuming it will only run on current officially supported Win and Mac OS

I really hope they end up using servo.

If you're ignoring established engines, it's a pretty good first step

I don't think the web is fixable as it is though. Performances are going to be terrible no matter what unless we pick a subset of functionality and provide native code to handle that.

EDIT: ooh, they're going to use the native engine on each platform! Wow! This is a non news.

As I read I was thinking Please don't use chromium Please don't use chromium Please don't use chromium Please don't use chromium Then I found it... Yes Then I saw 'building or own'... I thought. Why oh why.... sigh... At least consider Firefox

You didn't read enough: they will be using the default os webview so Edge on Windows, Chrome on Android and Webkit on Apples.

Edge = Chrome

The Google trackers are replaced by Microsoft trackers. It's a bit different.

totally different.

So I suppose... No Linux support? I assume a significant share of their users are Linux users.

If they're using webkit on Apple it's safe to assume they could use QtWebkit or GtkWebkit on linux. Linux will be lower priority probably strictly from a numbers game though.

Oh I read that alrigt. I think you may have missed my point...

May be they can turn Servo into a complete engine.

How many web developers get peeved when they see news of another prospective web browser, I wonder?

We don't care we'll just continue to test in Safari and Chrome and then ship it. You're on your own if you use something else, change the UA and hope for the best.

Now DuckDuckGo is building a new skin for someone else's old browser engine.

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