Do you know if the Mac version is still in beta? I was keeping track of it and awaiting the move out of beta, to see where it stood when moving from Nightly to Desktop on the https://privacytests.org/ website.
If you visit the download page, the page title still uses the word beta.
DuckDuckGo doesn’t appear to have blogged about the Mac browser since last year. And, I have not used it.
In terms of access, anyone with a Mac user agent can download the DMG.
Regardless of the beta label, the Mac browser appears to be ready for use. PrivacyTests.org shows version 1.43. And, for context, Gmail was in beta for five years. So, apart from the early waitlist, beta might not have a practical meaning for the browser.
if privacy is a concern, i would strongly caution against using anything from DuckDuckGo - the company cannot be trusted and its track record proves this out
if it’s a privacy-respecting, modern web browser one desires, well, to my knowledge there are none, but Firefox, along with a lot of tweaking, is as close as you’re going to get in my opinion and this is coming from someone who has a healthy dislike for Mozilla corporate - the other, and easier option, is LibreWolf which is based on the current release version of Firefox
I’m not fond of DuckDuckGo either, though for a more practical reason: as it’s a Bing clone, and for something owned by a tech giant, Bing is surprisingly of poor quality. My experience with DDG is quite similar to this test, where Bing is the rare instance of privacy and search quality, or the lack thereof, intersecting: second-guessing my search terms with commercial results.
Though I can see some utility on their creation of a browser, where it’s most likely done to simplify the switch, instead of tweaking dozens of settings to change the default. And that “fireproof” setting, protecting certain sites’ cookies from deleted to preserve log ins, seems unique and useful.
