Duck Duck, Firefox, Privacy et al

[philipbarrett]

About 6 weeks ago I decided to ditch my Chrome browser for Firefox and my default search to Duck Duck Go. Somewhat out of interest and also prompted by Chrome becoming such a piece of bloatware it's page loading has slowed to a processor taxing crawl. Also, my work has me doing searches that once tagged will completely fill my targeted ad space, try entering "Paris Ballroom Las Vegas Seating Capacity" a few times & see what that generates!

As a note I am on Instagram, not on Facebook and in a self-imposed read-only mode on Twitter. Aside from M/C forums that's where my SM engagement starts & ends.

So, in case anyone's interested here are my findings;

Pros

• Firefox is a nice clean browser, much faster page loads and they pay the bills by placing a sponsored tile on your New Tab window which is pretty unobtrusive
• The targeted ads across the board have gone down by about 90% (some caveats to that in the Cons section)
• All your favorite ad-blockers & no-scripts work fine, a pop-up blocker is built into the browser
• Duck Duck Go typically takes you straight to key info rather than shopping links, for example "JBL Line Array" will be top of the search returns rather than companies trying to sell you JBL home stereo products
• No integration with Chromecast for YouTube and WSBK racing binge watching

Cons

• Duck Duck Go is a mediocre search engine at best (it uses Bing) - for deep and language based searches ("why does my left knee hurt when I ride my bicycle") Google wins hands down & I find myself having to switch over to it many times a day
• DDG uses Bing Maps which are akin to Mapquest circa 2012 vs. Google Maps 2022, no street view, no integration with your phone
• Not getting targeted ads means you get a lot of repetitious ads, as the data pool is smaller so are the subjects you see, so the number of ads in say Instagram doesn't drop they just become much more singular in focus or way off the mark

I'll give it a couple more weeks but my route forward is probably to continue with Firefox and go back to Google for searches.

 

[Ausfahrt]

Duck Duck Go is a mediocre search engine at best (it uses Bing) - for deep and language based searches ("why does my left knee hurt when I ride my bicycle") Google wins hands down & I find myself having to switch over to it many times a day

Many times a day. Really?

I use DDG and only rarely don't get what I'm looking for.

 

[philipbarrett]

Many times a day. Really?

I use DDG and only rarely don't get what I'm looking for.

Work often requires sounding vaguely knowledgeable about a huge diaspora of products and applications. Google is my buddy there.

 

[Yooper_Bob]

DDG also has an excellent android browser app!

 

[Ausfahrt]

Work often requires sounding vaguely knowledgeable about a huge diaspora of products and applications. Google is my buddy there.

I understand. Extra credit for using diaspora in a sentence.

 

[Austin]

I left Chrome about a year ago because of all the security issues with it. It's a hard thing for a developer to do because Chrome was very friendly for developers. I can't stand how when you launch Firefox it updates itself. 1 it's slow to launch and 2 I don't like the latest and greatest software until others have vetted it lol. I'm on Safari now, it was very hard to get used to at first but I forced myself into it.

I left Google search for DDG back when they were busted manipulating search results. I was never fully satisfied with DDG, but they were honest... keyword is WERE. Now that they have been busted manipulating political related search results I switched back to Google Search. If I'm forced to have skewed results I'm at least going to use the more robust search engine. I'm not sure how much longer DDG can live on now that they've squandered the one thing keeping them afloat.

 

[ZoomerP]

DDG uses Bing Maps which are akin to Mapquest circa 2012 vs. Google Maps 2022, no street view, no integration with your phone

Agreed, it's a few steps backwards. I work around it be keeping a Google Maps link in my Bookmark bar.