> However, you do not need ublock origin here for privacy protection.
I'm happy to see DuckDuckGo entering this space and happy to see them building off of WebKit. And I think that DuckDuckGo is doing some fairly good stuff for privacy right now, and I hope they continue to move in that direction.
Nevertheless, this is a concerning comment. Ublock Origin isn't the only way to block ads of course, and it's not impossible for something else to do better. But there is a reason it's widely considered to be arguably the best adblocking browser extensions right now, and it's not just hype or advertising.
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> Our tracker blocker is powered by our best-in-class Tracker Radar data set
The reason Ublock Origin is currently arguably the best-in-class adblocker for privacy protection is not because it does web crawling or because it uses a special data set, it's because of its capabilities.
DuckDuckGo using Tracker Radar data really has nothing to do with this conversation. It's possible DuckDuckGo's protections are sufficient on their own, but to make that determination you'd need to talk about the actual anti-circumvention features that it has, not just where it gets its data from.
Bringing up Apple is particularly unfortunate, because Safari has easily the worst adblocking performance out of any major browser, so if they are using the Tracker Radar set to inform that, it's apparently not enough on its own to give them competitive adblocking performance.
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> Similarly our Smarter Encryption (HTTPS upgrading -- https://github.com/duckduckgo/smarter-encryption) is also based on regular web crawls and is many times more comprehensive then anything else out there.
This really shouldn't be in the same conversation, adblocking and connection upgrades are two separate factors of privacy. Both are important, but "we upgrade HTTPS" is kind of orthogonal to extension support.
However, since we're talking about HTTPS upgrading, bringing up that DuckDuckGo maintains a large list of sites to upgrade for doesn't really mean that much given that HTTPS upgrade policies (ought to) just all be based on the same lists. It's the same issue as above, I'm not worried about what data you use, that should be something that a lot of different extensions pull from. I'm worried about the capabilities, I'm worried about how effectively the browser can actually leverage that data set.