But i still didn't buy DDG's privacy stuff
Instead of using DDG's !wiki or googling "wiki [topic]" you can configure a search keyword to send you to Wikipedia's search results page, cutting out the middleman. I have this done for a dozen or so sites I use frequently and this has cut my general purpose search engine usage down significantly.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address...
This is the sort of privacy enhancing feature that Firefox should streamline and advertise. I wonder if they don't make it known to users because it might influence how much money Google is willing to give them for being the default general purpose search engine..
The Chrome UI is somewhat better and it also automatically creates these when you use a search somewhere, with a keyword equivalent to the site's domain.
I don't know why Mozilla doesn't just copy this old Opera UI: https://i.postimg.cc/1XCg1HG8/opera-search-edit.png
Firefox lost most of its identity by updating its UI to look more like Old Opera. And it has been copying Opera since it was called Phoenix.
This is also the reason I use Firefox. It is the browser that more closely resembles Old Opera.
Anyone can do better than Google when it comes to privacy, especially if you define "privacy" as "don't do what Google is doing". It is almost a tautology: we first define Google as the opposite of privacy and then market yourself as private by not being Google. In order to drive the point, you add some kind of blocking feature and, yay, private!
In order to be relevant, you need to do more than that. Firefox used to be a great browser not because it was private, but because it was a great browser. It had great support for the latest web technologies, tabbed browsing before IE, it was fast, etc... And because of that it managed to make a dent in IE market share. But now, what does it have that Chrome doesn't besides not being from Google? Firefox even lost most of its identity by discontinuing XUL (for good reasons, I know) and updating its UI to look more like Chrome. I use both browsers on a day-to-day basis and Chrome tends to work better on average, though Firefox seems to be slowly catching up. I don't know what the situation is with Servo but it might be what Firefox needs.
Another example would be DuckDuckGo. Again, it caught the "privacy" virus. Please, no, "private" just means you are a proxy for inferior Bing results in this case. The worst part is that DDG has more to offer than "privacy", like instant answers and bangs. Why not market these instead?