The web can be a confusing place at times – and that’s doubly true when you venture on to certain websites that bombard you with ads, popups and generally make a mockery of the idea of private browsing. Modern-day web browsers do their best to minimise these tracking technologies, but often you’re forced to look at third-party browser plugins to close the gaps.

DuckDuckGo has always been lauded as a privacy-first search engine, and now it’s dipping its toe into the water with its first desktop browser. The idea is to give you a more private browsing experience without you needing to mess about with settings and plugins.

You’ll be presented with a modern-looking, minimalist browser that’s not a million miles removed from the likes of Edge. Click Get Started, and a wizard will offer to import your passwords from a wide variety of sources (password managers as well as browsers) as well as making it your default browser.

And that’s it: from here you simply start browsing the web as normal – DuckDuckGo will then use its various privacy technologies – including tracking protections and ad-blockers – in the background to not just make your browsing less public but also remove annoyances like constant cookie popups while speeding up page loading through filtering out unwanted page elements like ads to reduce the amount being downloaded.

As you browse, DuckDuckGo will pop up contextual dialogs designed to help showcase its features – for example, the browser can intercept and handle cookie popups from websites as and when they appear. You’ll also be prompted to view videos like those offered on YouTube through its own Duck Player, again avoiding personalised ads and tracking cookies.

While it’s undoubtedly a slicker, more privacy-focussed way to access the internet, DuckDuckGo Browser still has one major shortcoming: a complete lack of extension support. That will appear in a future version, but it’s still worth checking out now if you’d rather your digital footprint wasn’t left all over your web activity.