From the official blog: >Instead of forking Chromium or anything else, we’re building our desktop app around the OS-provided rendering engines (like on mobile)

From the official blog: >Instead of forking Chromium or anything else, we’re building our desktop app around the OS-provided rendering engines (like on mobile), allowing us to strip away a lot of the unnecessary cruft and clutter that’s accumulated over the years in major browsers. With our clean and simple interface combined with the beloved Fire Button from our mobile app, DuckDuckGo for desktop will be ready to become your new everyday browsing app. It seems they are making the desktop equivalent of Firefox Focus.