cross pond high tech

Privacy-centric search engine DuckDuckGo is working on an "everyday" desktop browser, according to CEO Gabriel Weinberg. In a blog post, Weinberg said the company is building a desktop app "from the ground up" using OS-provided rendering engines rather than Chromium, the browser codebase underpinning Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and other browsers.

 

• This will allow DuckDuckGo to "strip away a lot of the unnecessary cruft and clutter that's accumulated over the years in major browsers," Weinberg said. 
• The CEO noted that the browser will have default “robust privacy protection," meaning users won't have to turn it on in security settings.
• Like its mobile version, the desktop browser will also contain a Fire button to erase stored data, tabs, and browsing history.
• Early tests have shown the browser is “significantly faster” than Google Chrome, he claimed. It's now in closed beta testing on macOS, with no announced release date yet.
• Also in the blog post, Weinberg went through the company's achievements in 2021. One of those was reaching 150 million downloads of its privacy apps for iOS and Android and Chromium extensions.

SAI chart of the day shows that Google's Chrome browser, which doesn't come pre-installed on any computer, has leapt past Internet Explorer, which is pre-installed in over 90% of all computers, to become the most popular web browser.

Firefox seems to be sliding too, while Safari, though still modest, is gaining share discreetly. The same chart limited to mobile browsing shall be interesting too !

All six major browser vendors have plans to support DNS-over-HTTPS (or DoH), a protocol that encrypts DNS traffic and helps improve a user's privacy on the web.

The DoH protocol has been one of the year's hot topics. It's a protocol that, when deployed inside a browser, it allows the browser to hide DNS requests and responses inside regular-looking HTTPS traffic.

Doing this makes a user's DNS traffic invisible to third-party network observers, such as ISPs. But while users love DoH and have deemed it a privacy boon, ISPs, networking operators, and cyber-security vendors hate it.

A UK ISP called Mozilla an "internet villain" for its plans to roll out DoH, and a Comcast-backed lobby group has been caught preparing a misleading document about DoH that they were planning to present to US lawmakers in the hopes of preventing DoH's broader rollout.

However, this may be a little too late. ZDNet has spent the week reaching out to major web browser providers to gauge their future plans regarding DoH, and all vendors plan to ship it, in one form or another.