DuckDuckGo staff here. As mentioned in the linked page, the purpose of the request is to retrieve a website's favicon so that it can be displayed in certain places within the app or on the results page. We use an internal favicon service because it can be complicated to locate a favicon for a website. They can be stored in a variety of locations and in a variety of formats. The service understands these edge cases an…
DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers
111–120 of 531 posts
Re: DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers
#112DuckDuckGo staff here. As mentioned in the linked page, the purpose of the request is to retrieve a website's favicon so that it can be displayed in certain places within the app or on the results page. We use an internal favicon service because it can be complicated to locate a favicon for a website. They can be stored in a variety of locations and in a variety of formats. The service understands these edge cases an…
I appreciate you answering, probably knowing you'd face some negative feedback. Saying "we should trust you, it's for a good reason" is what google and everyone else says. You'll be better off if you just end this. The loss of the fav icon is less important than keeping your credibility.
Re: DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does that work? What does Google have to gain from it? Google has pretty aggressive anti-scraping protections to protect against this exact behavior, so why would they allow Startpage to get away with it? What does Startpage have to gain from it? Unlike DDG, they don't seem to have any core product, so they fully depend on Google's goodwill which is very shaky grounds when it comes to a long-term business.
> Unlike DDG, they don't seem to have any core product, so they fully depend on Google's goodwill which is very shaky grounds when it comes to a long-term business. Isn't that exactly like DDG but Google instead of Bing?
Re: DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disagree on most points, actually: >Faster, less bloat Stock Firefox doesn't actually have that much bloat, and it's not noticeably slower than Chrome on reasonably modern hardware (i.e.: most page loads are near-instant, same as in Chrome on a good connection). >Extension support for Chromium is way better too Until Google decides that your extension is unworthy of being in their store. This notably happened with Pu…
As I said in other another comment, I'm a power user. And by power user I mean probably 10x the normal standard of what a 10x power user means. Tooling is everything to me; which is why I prefer this over anything else. I'm very biased.
Re: DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn’t make sense for a browser: just embed the service’s logic in the browser, the browser has all the same information the service could get.
We had already had created this anonymous favicon service for our private search engine. In addition, doing it this way avoids another request (and potentially multiple) to the end site. The service is private as we do not collect any personal information (e.g. IP addresses) on any requests for this or any service and the requests are all end-to-end encrypted.
Re: DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn’t make sense for a browser: just embed the service’s logic in the browser, the browser has all the same information the service could get.
We had already had created this anonymous favicon service for our private search engine. In addition, doing it this way avoids another request (and potentially multiple) to the end site. The service is private as we do not collect any personal information (e.g. IP addresses) on any requests for this or any service and the requests are all end-to-end encrypted.
It's a really bad look and you should ditch it.
Re: DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
"This is not to say that DDG is perfect: links you click do seem to be redirected through a /l/ page on their domain ..." I am surprised the user is not complaining about this instead of the favicons. Their privacy policy goes on about the privacy implications of Referer headers and instead of calling out browsers for sending Referer by default, they instead give themselves power to record all the user's clicked resu…
Unable to reproduce. Links appear to be plain links and no JS intercepts clicks.
If I recall correctly there is a way to turn off the prefixed result URLs without having to turn on Javascript, by adding/changing a URL parameter, e.g., kh. However that is not the default setting. Not very friendly toward the privacy-conscious user who has Javascript disabled and does not read HN to find out about otherwise undocumented URL parameter usage.
For certain queries, I can actually get a different first result based on the HTTP method I use.
Re: DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers
#118DuckDuckGo staff here. As mentioned in the linked page, the purpose of the request is to retrieve a website's favicon so that it can be displayed in certain places within the app or on the results page. We use an internal favicon service because it can be complicated to locate a favicon for a website. They can be stored in a variety of locations and in a variety of formats. The service understands these edge cases an…
Re: DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers
#119DuckDuckGo staff here. As mentioned in the linked page, the purpose of the request is to retrieve a website's favicon so that it can be displayed in certain places within the app or on the results page. We use an internal favicon service because it can be complicated to locate a favicon for a website. They can be stored in a variety of locations and in a variety of formats. The service understands these edge cases an…
Re: DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn’t make sense for a browser: just embed the service’s logic in the browser, the browser has all the same information the service could get.
We had already had created this anonymous favicon service for our private search engine. In addition, doing it this way avoids another request (and potentially multiple) to the end site. The service is private as we do not collect any personal information (e.g. IP addresses) on any requests for this or any service and the requests are all end-to-end encrypted.
This is troubling.