Tell HN: DuckDuckGo now has anoying popup

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33858313

by majkinetor • 4 years ago

21 18 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

DDG now shows popup for their extension. See how it looks here: https://i.imgur.com/xSvnCF6.png

Its so anoying and show up constantly even if you close it, that I had to use uBlock Origin to remove it.

Dark patterns seem to always happen no matter who you are or claim to be.

Damn Eternal Semptember...

pwg• 4 years ago

The "plain html" variant of their search page does not give me any such popup:

https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/

majkinetor3• 4 years ago

That is a good tip!

However, it looks like you do miss out some features that way.

Most notably, you can't use search shortcut in Firefox/Chrome as it does POST instead of GET

notRobot• 4 years ago

There's also https://lite.DuckDuckGo.com/ and https://start.duckduckgo.com/ which doesn't have this banner.

deznu• 4 years ago

I saw this, closed it and it prompted me to go to start.duckduckgo.com - apparently if you clear your cookies often this popup can keep showing up, this subdomain looks to avoid this problem and simply not show popups.

majkinetor3• 4 years ago

I am not cleraing cookies. This happened on all of my machines...

start.ddg can be used with browser settings, which is nice. I switched to it.

adyashakti• 4 years ago

I switched to Ecosia.

lionkor• 4 years ago

Isn't that Google? Google lacks all the features I use DDG for (privacy and bangs)

zahma2• 4 years ago

It apparently is Bing.

dontbenebby• 4 years ago

The search engine is good but I guess they are having income issues since they keep pushing these McAfee style products and patterns.

They’re useful more as a way to divert tax revenue from California to PA, my home state, which has been run roughshod by anti tax ex tech bros for too long, than as a suite of products in the way MS or Google offers.

(I keep having to fall back to Bing for some types queries they’re better at slapping together a bunch of existing things than creating their own algorithms, spidering etc… but the bang commands are useful and a lot of IAs allow you to do an opaque query over HTTPS like calculate a sha256 hash that some users lacking terminal access might not be able to do locally.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos• 4 years ago

TURN OFF JAVASCRIPT

I'd say it louder if I could

bil7• 4 years ago

the extension is actually really good - enables you to use the !bang syntax

puffoflogic• 4 years ago

You don't need the extension for that, though...

wara23arish• 4 years ago

Switched to brave recently, like it better so far

theaudacityofyw• 4 years ago

Gave up on DDG after the Microsoft tracker thing, nothing against people still using it, I just couldn't personally trust them now. Objectively speaking, I found Brave Search provides better results with nice features. You can also use SearX to proxy DDG searches.

It's a shame, DDG are otherwise so user friendly.

cf100clunk• 4 years ago

Have you tried using DuckDuckGo's Cloud Save configuration feature when using start.duckduckgo.com? Click on the three-arrowed hamburger menu and you'll find it. Set up DuckDuckGo's options as you like, then apply a pass phrase to store them. I know it isn't a direct solution to thwarting that popup the first time you see it, but it prevents it in the future. Cloud Save is handy to know in order to propagate your settings across browsers regardless of platforms.

https://help.duckduckgo.com/settings/cloud-save/

Tell HN: DuckDuckGo now has anoying popup

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