Conclusion
My impression is that DuckDuckGo works much better as a search engine than as a browser. Yes, it does what it says, and it has some nice tricks and features. But at the end of the day, it does not block (all) ads, there are many different ways you can stop or block trackers, and the notifications and popups and interaction messages are simply too distracting. I really don't need my browser to be cute and cuddly.
DuckDuckGo has come a long way in the past few years. Really has. But there's a lot more work on the browser front. I would suggest an optional total adblocker, too. It could be in the untoggled state, and the tour guide could expose it for those who want or need that. Speaking of the guide, that's a big no-no for me. I might be an old dinosaur, but those messages and popups don't add anything useful to the experience. In fact, they break the workflow, they alarm the user (and sometimes inaccurately, too), and in the end, they create a sense of hecticness that prevents one from appreciating the true privacy benefits of DDG. If this thing kicked in after a week or two, or maybe there was one tiny nudge here or there, that would give people time to get accustomed to the browser before exploring, well, everything. The over-enthusiasm is simply over-whelming [sic].
Finally, there's the question of simple and pure effectiveness. My expectations of a browser are security, privacy flexibility, and stupidity prevention, not necessarily in that order. DuckDuckGo delivers on most of these aspects, but not the last one, I'm afraid. In this regard, Firefox + UBO remains the simplest, most elegant browsing solution. Could DDG be a solid secondary browser for me? Yes, that it could do. But in general, I'd rather not use the Web if I cannot block the modern pointlessness. Let's face it, ads have been known as a naughty vector of all sorts of problems, including tracking, occasional malware, waste of resources, annoyances, and then some. You can't really have a privacy-focused browser that does not have a mechanism to handle these, whether integrally or through an extension. I heard there's something called Duck Player, essentially a DuckDuckGo-filtered mode for Youtube sans ads and such, but I wasn't able to activate anything like this in this mobile app. And that's only one small aspect of the entire ecosystem picture. There's more to the Internet than streaming Youtube clips. Well, there you go. For now, DDG mobile browser, sort of recommended, but there's work to be done, and you need patience to get through the first-time use tour. See you.
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