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DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

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81–90 of 98 posts

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#81
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I'm the CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo.) It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth." I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter but I subsequently put out a clarification tweet[1] and then we made this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings work: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-…

What you have basically done here is say "we only downrank spam" (this is fine), and then said "state-sponsored news is inherently spam" (this is not). You are using a definition of "spam" that is not commonly held or understood by those who would be your users. Whether or not this is for a noble reason, this renders it a dark pattern. This is not only a violation of the principle of least astonishment, your explanat…

> we rely on multiple non-governmental and non-political organizations that specialize in objectively assessing journalistic standards.

This is a vaguely worded workaround for applying censorship, especially without giving a specific list of organizations that they consult. The use of the term "objective" is very sneaky here, even manipulative. I didn't realize DuckDuckGo did this - how disappointing.

Time to start trying other search engines, perhaps a proxied or self-hosted one like SearXNG as GP suggested.

https://docs.searxng.org/

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it is a standard Apple API so less work to do.

True, but I as expecting them to want to port the browser to other platforms. Well, you can use webkit on those as well, so maybe it's less work, I don't know.

WebKit is technically cross-platform, but browsers that use it only exist in Linux and Mac world. If DDG ports their browser to Windows and doesn't switch to Blink, then it will be the only well-maintained WebKit browser for Windows.

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#83
post #65

So will uBlock Origin be "crippled" in this browser, like in Chrome/Chromium and Safari?

Does uBlock Origin even exist for Safari? If not, then I imagine it won't exist for this browser either, since it's just a wrapper around a macOS-provided, Safari-/WebKit-based webview.

Orion is another WebKit browser that makes WebExtensions installable via its own extensions API. It's not perfect but it's miles better than anything Safari has and allows for existing Firefox/Chrome extensions to be installed. It only supports MV2 and won't be affected by the MV3 changes in Chrome world.

If DDG wanted to they could replicate this work to allow for MV2 WebExtensions to be installed.

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#84
post #2

> All the app code – tab and bookmark management, our new tab page, our password manager, etc. – is written by our own engineers. For rendering, it uses a public macOS API, making it super compatible with Mac devices. Is this a new way of saying that they use Webkit?

I wonder why they went with WebKit? It is nice to see another WebKit browser and not just a Blink/Chromium spinoff. Still it is a surprising choice, even if there's really only WebKit and Blink available for wannabe browser makers.

WebKit is vastly superior to Blink on Mac.

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#85
post #11
post #4

What is this, a browser? Why do I need a new browser?

Here's a tl;dr for you on "why do I need a new browser" from the post: * Better web tracking protections: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/we... . This includes a bunch of protections not offered by most other browsers and extensions by default (e.g., embedded facebook content protection), or more robust versions of them (e.g., our HTTPS everywhere list is orders of magnitude bigger). More ge…

Duck Player

Duck player seems interesting to me. I use firefox containers to browse youtube and one of my pet peeves with safari is not being able to keep my google and youtube cookies separately.

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#86
post #6
post #3

I used to be a fan of DuckDuckGo. I mained it as my search engine for a long while because it was better for privacy, and it gave me my choice. Then, they decided that they were the arbiters of truth, and they'd start censoring "Russian disinformation campaigns." Because apparently that's important to them. The fact that they also get most of their results from Bing also subtracts points. I also eventually realized t…

(I'm the CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo.) It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth." I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter but I subsequently put out a clarification tweet[1] and then we made this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings work: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-…

Hi, didn't expect to see you here.

I have a question I always wanted to ask. Why should people trust your privacy centric services when you are famous for your previous project which was essentially a pyramid scheme for harvesting user data, which you then sold along with the data? Any rational person would expect DDG to also be a user data harvesting scheme.

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#87
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It almost beggars belief to have to say that of course the vaccine testing is on efficacy of infection prevention, not transmissibility. But wouldn't you know it? The less likely you are to get infected and the faster your body clears the virus, the less the virus is or can be transmitted. Yes, peak viral load for infections that do "breakthrough" may be the same as unvaccinated. That's not a smoking gun. There is a…

You admit to there being coordinated efforts against labor and the working class - so how do you deal with the cognitive dissonance with 1) the history that the pharmaceutical industry continuously being a very bad actor with the reward of billions in profit, 2) that pharma industry in the U.S. (for example) accounts for something like 80% of the advertising revenue on all mainstream-legacy media channels (capturing…

"Coordinated efforts against labor and the working class" doesn't convince anyone of anything. Almost every company ever tried to pay their workers the least they could get away with. There are also "coordinated efforts by labor against the wealthy class" - ie union organizing. Every worker in the world hopes to get paid more, even me. But there's no coordinated effort to lie to you about the fact that covid vaccine helps protect you from getting covid. No one made all the scientists believe that a virus causes covid. Fauci didn't want to get people vaccinated because he was being paid, he studied public health and wasn't an idiot, that is all it took for those professionals to see we should encourage vaccination.

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#88
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know if DDG also did the same - or perhaps their rankings were already captured by the likes of Reuters et al ("fact checkers") - for the COVID pandemic narrative? It's quite apparent their desired narrative is falling apart now, where a Pfizer executive publicly admitted they didn't even test for transmissabiity - meanwhile that was arguably the primary promotion point for the mRNA shots propagated by the cap…

> It's quite apparent their desired narrative is falling apart now, where a Pfizer executive publicly admitted they didn't even test for transmissabiity This was known when the clinical trial docs where first published. No one said it did at the very beginning, it was never hidden by anyone. The data of reducing transmission was collected when the vaccines began to roll out. And for pre-omicron strains it did reduce…

Yeah, all the conspiratorial anti-vax BS is just sad. There weren't millions of people killed by getting vaccinated, so all that pre-shot BS about the danger of a new vaccine didn't pan out - because they'd been testing it for years, and it wasn't actually dangerous.

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#90
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They seem to set something on `window.navigator._duckduckgoloader_` If you run `JSON.stringify(window.navigator)`, it only shows the _duckduckgoloader_ variable. Anybody knows why JSON.stringify behaves like that?

JSON.stringify is outputting the "own, enumerable" properties. The default properties of window.navigator aren't enumerable and/or come through the prototype chain. The rules for JSON.stringify are actually pretty complicated: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

Thanks for sharing!
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