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Trial Partnership With DuckDuckGo For PortableApps.com Downloads

John T. Haller's picture
Submitted by John T. Haller on May 3, 2018 - 6:29pm

I'm pleased to announce a new trial partnership with DuckDuckGo, the Internet privacy company, to host some of the downloads you will get from PortableApps.com. DuckDuckGo's popular search engine, tracker blocking extension, and mobile apps are built around user privacy and security, so their ideals line up perfectly with ours. We've been searching for a new provider for some time and this seems like a natural fit.

To start, we're trying out downloads of the PortableApps.com Platform, Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition in English, and Q-Dir Portable within your browser through DuckDuckGo's hosting and we'll be adjusting this based on user feedback and download performance. The download is safe, secure, and 100% private. Your personal information will not be tracked, stored, or shared.

I'm always happy to bring attention to services that respect your personal data and security, and can support the future of PortableApps.com development in a way that fits with our own values. This will help ensure we can keep building the software you love and keep the flow of awesome apps coming.

Thanks for continuing to use PortableApps.com and happy portable app-ing!

Comments

I use DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine everywhere I can and I'm really glad to see PortableApps.com partnering with them. Will PA.c be switching the default search engine on any of the browsers released here to DDG? Doing so could potentially be a good additional revenue stream for PortableApps.com if it's feasible.
(FYI: DDG's ‘bang’ feature is very useful.)

~3D1T0R

WoW... sounds great!

By the way, mostly the enterprise's environments blocks the use of Mozilla Firefox and accessing to google web search or yahoo search rise SSLs security / certificate errors, and isnt't possible use them (or every site that use https's requests)... but DuckDuckGo works!!!

Reason why Enterprises don't use FF as much as they "maybe" would like..
Is that Chrome and IE supports Group Policy Objects (GPO), FF are in development to support GPO...

It looks great.
Speed is fast and download is reliable.

I love DuckDuckGo!

I use DuckDuckGo regularly, it is a little bit slower than Google, which delivers sponsored results faster...
I am looking forward the deployment

Brando212's picture

duckduckgo is blocked at my location but source forge is allowed; can the sourceforge download links please be placed below the duckduckgo ones as an alternate?

Never knock on Death's door: ring the bell and run away! Death really hates that!
Matt Frewer

John T. Haller's picture

The great firewall of China blocks DuckDuckGo. You can download the PortableApps.com Platform from the Simplified Chinese homepage here: https://portableapps.com/zh-cn

That will allow you to download apps from SourceForge and/or our servers depending on the app, at least for the moment.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

Brando212's picture

Thank you but that's not it. I am in the US, our corporate filters are just a bit sensitive sometimes and visiting duckduckgo seems to be a no for me.

I am with First Data corporation in Nebraska. they've OK'd us using portable apps such as Notepad++ and Gimp so there's no issue in using the products. our corp filters just don't like duckduckgo for some reason

Never knock on Death's door: ring the bell and run away! Death really hates that!
Matt Frewer

John T. Haller's picture

That's a pretty bad filter if they're blocking the search engine that doesn't track you. You can use the platform in your case as well as it downloads from SourceForge for open source apps, our own hosted servers for freeware, and some publisher servers where they specify hosting (The Document Foundation, for instance). There's an alternate download link on the download page below the download button: https://portableapps.com/download

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

Is there also a way to download a previous version via DuckDuckGo or do I have to fall back to SourceForge if I need an older version for testing? (I hope, they will be still uploaded there.)

John T. Haller's picture

We're only hosting current releases on DuckDuckGo. Presently, all open source apps are still uploaded to SourceForge, so you can still get older releases there.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

John T. Haller's picture

If you have Javascript disabled, it won't work.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

I don't have Javascript disabled. I've tried Chrome, Firefox, and Opera; but still no joy.
Are apps still available from SourceForge? Your post from August 3rd said that the open-source apps are. Where would I find these links?

John T. Haller's picture

I'd like to get to the bottom of this. What specific app isn't downloading for you? Even if it is multiple, please give me a couple specific ones. What geographic location are you in? What adblockers and antivirus/antimalware apps are you running?

Note that I may move this to a new topic to be easier to track.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

First, I tried to download Ant Renamer from Firefox (installed on Windows 10), but it only took me to the duckduckgo software page. Then I tried to download Firefox, thinking that there may be a problem with my installed browser, but again it only went to duckduckgo. So I tried to download the PortableApps Platform, hoping to use it to download the other apps, but it also took me to duckduckgo. Then I tried downloading Ant Renamer from Opera, then from Chrome. Then I tried to download Ant Renamer from a Linux Mint live CD on a different computer.

After reading your last reply, I tried again. Now downloading works (from within Firefox) for Firefox and PortableApps platform, but I still can't download Ant Renamer, from any of my browsers.

I am in California. I use AdBlock Plus in Firefox, but no adblockers in Chrome or Opera. The only antivirus I use is Windows Defender.

John T. Haller's picture

The Ant Renamer page had an incomplete version so was linking to a file that did not exist. It's been fixed as of now.

As for the others, I am unsure why the others were not working for you previously. Please post a specific note in the forums if you encounter an error of being unable to download a specific file.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!