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Comment by ARandomerDude | Hacker News Reader

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ARandomerDude

For those who know a lot more than I do, how does this compare to Brave?

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It's not that great. Brave is ahead when it comes to privacy and features and does a lot of things differently.

Also the fact that their contract requires them to whitelist Microsoft trackers is something to be wary of.

https://brave.com/privacy-features/

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...

It's a browser with a bunch of privacy features, just like Brave but with a more opinionated design and subtle differences. It caters to people who don't want to configure a thousand things before they use their browser, which is the only unique selling point of this that I'm aware of.

> Webkit-based browser [...]just like Brave

Brave for Mac is not Webkit-based. It is Blink and V8.

Blink is a fork of the WebCore component of WebKit, and aside from sandboxing, has remained relatively similar to WebCore. As such, Brave necessarily is based on WebKit via transitve relation. V8 is a JavaScipt engine, not a browser rendering engine.

Practically, there are only two rendering engines left, 1) WebKit (itself derived from KHTML) and its derivatives such as Blink, and 2) Gecko and its derivatives such as Goanna, (though I guess somewhere someone must be using Flow, which apparently is not based on either, but it is proprietary, thus it will have no derivatives or be used by any other browser other than Flow).

Blink is similar to WebKit like WebKit is similar to KHTML. In other words, the relation is only relevant for the purposes of historical curiosity.

Thanks for pointing that out. I was mis-reading some of the comments here saying the DDG browser in question is Webkit (because it's a MacOS browser only, for now). So is it based off Chromium as the base then?

(I know Brave is Chromium based)

No, you read right. The DDG browser for Mac is WebKit. Specifically it's using the WKWebView Class from the WebKit Framework[0]

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkit/wkwebview

DDG isn't doing uBO level ad blocking like Brave does. It's just blocking common tracking domains and elements, so you don't get (much) cosmetic filtering and some ads will still show up. My local newspaper's site has grey boxes where the ads would be without content or DNS blocking. On YouTube, it can't block the ads unless you open in the "Duck Player" (a page where it embeds the video). It also doesn't support extensions.

That said, it has a cleaner interface than Brave, and it has that fire button from DDG Mobile that deletes everything except for cookies on sites you "fireproof". It's a really nice compromise between "save everything until you delete everything" and "incognito mode" that I wish other browsers would adopt. Plus it uses WebKit so theoretically it should be fast and battery efficient like Safari.

In my opinion there isn't much reason to use DDG Browser unless you really like the fire button. If you want a WebKit browser, Safari with the AdGuard extension blocks ads and trackers, has extensions including more password manager options, and has its own email relay feature. Otherwise Firefox and Brave are excellent and cross-platform.

It seems to be designed as a standalone "incognito" only browser. You can except certain sites from being routinely cleared from memory (fireproofing as they call it).

Doesn't really have other features or support for extensions from what I've seen.

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