I was curious what the answer to this was, so I went to their Chrome extension page[0] and the icon + UI is prominently displayed in the 5th image. They also mention email (albeit you may be able to argue it's too vague) in the very first image. They also mention the feature in the extension's description with a brief "what is it?" blurb. You do have to expand the overview section to see it, but I think that's on Google's UI and not on any individual extension/developer being shady (it's been so long since I've installed a new extension, but a quick glance around the store makes it seem like everybody with a "long" description has stuff hidden like they do).

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/duckduckgo-privacy...

The problem is that vast majority of users installed it before the ad was added.

I was just answering your question on if they advertised it, because I was also curious of the answer, haha.

> How do you like extensions to notify of new features?

No notifications at all.

Yes, I understand that it is a conflict of interest between me and whoever writes software.

Optionally, notification in some central standard system of notifications that people hating notifications can silence (not sure is such system existing - if it exists I silenced it long time ago). This would work fine as notifications-haters can disable them and vast majority of people will continue to get them.

Ahhh, gotcha!

So if I'm understanding correctly, you'd be fine with DDG's update if it was just the icon being added to the field (making an assumption here that the icon is how you activate the feature like a password manager), but by adding the ad/onboarding/whatever popup they went too far.

That's a fair criticism! At first, I was taking your stance as it was a terrible wrong that they added another privacy feature in general.