DDG "Privacy Essentials" is a highly privileged extension that can do absolutely anything with all of your private data. Installing it is among the worst ideas I can think of. This weird quirk is the least of its problems.
At this point all users should assume that you are lying also about not storing search histories matched to users.
It's not promoting a new service. It's highlighting a feature of the thing you installed.
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/duckduckgo-privacy...
edit: How do you like extensions to notify of new features? I've seen some do a new tab popup post-install, some just add them and you discover them like DDG, and I'm sure a few have added new features I'll never know about because they're disabled by default. I've always found the new tab way annoying, and I've been slightly less annoyed by just adding the feature with a way to disable.
No notifications at all.
Yes, I understand that it is a conflict of interest between me and whoever writes software.
Optionally, notification in some central standard system of notifications that people hating notifications can silence (not sure is such system existing - if it exists I silenced it long time ago). This would work fine as notifications-haters can disable them and vast majority of people will continue to get them.
So if I'm understanding correctly, you'd be fine with DDG's update if it was just the icon being added to the field (making an assumption here that the icon is how you activate the feature like a password manager), but by adding the ad/onboarding/whatever popup they went too far.
That's a fair criticism! At first, I was taking your stance as it was a terrible wrong that they added another privacy feature in general.
In my area there were DuckDuckGo billboards along the interstate all last year. You don't buy interstate billboards unless you're targeting the mainstream.
Then you sell them the idea that by installing your highly privileged software, that can read and transmit literally any data available to the user, they are enhancing their privacy. This is a stupid trade that nobody would take if they stopped and thought about it. The nebulous tracking thing is clearly lower risk than your browser extension, and there are other, better, less risky ways to subvert web tracking.