DuckDuckGo for Mac does not fork Chromium (or anything else). Instead, we use the rendering engine that comes with macOS, which is created by Apple and the same rendering engine Safari uses. By building off the macOS rendering engine, our browser should also be most compatible with the Mac system (the same as Safari). Technically, we don’t have to “fork” any code to do this – we just call an API provided by macOS.We are building everything else from scratch. So beyond rendering, all the code is ours – written by DuckDuckGo engineers with privacy, security, and simplicity front of mind.

Introducing DuckDuckGo for Mac: A Private, Fast, and Secure Browsing App

I signed up for the beta list to try this as soon as I learned about it. Perhaps it can unseat Brave as my browser of choice. If nothing else, it’ll be great to have a non-Chromium based alternative.