Preview of the new Startpage.com October 25, 2018 https://www.ghacks.net/2018/10/25/preview-of-the-new-startpage-com/
Hmmm...looks good to me. Looks almost like google and that's a good thing. It's good because people are not rational animals and are slaves of habit. Most will use google because that's all they know and are just used to. Even tought there are better alternatives (startpage, duckduckgo), at least in terms of privacy.
The problem to me is speed, even if it's only milliseconds, it still feels slower than Google. That's why I never made the switch, not to forget about the search results.
Unfotunately this is the criteria that far overweighs other (privacy, speed, features) and Google knows it all too well.
I've never observed any difference in speed between SP and Google on an old laptop with weak specs and DSL Internet. However, I find Duck Duck GO to be quite slow because of the way the results page is laid out.
Tho I do use SP, still I'm forced to default to Google for very this reason. Only 2 privacy focused search engines I've found barely usable are SP & Disconnect Search w/ Google (deprecated), yet Google, who's becoming worse and worse every year still produces more many and better results, not to mention their useful search tools. I wonder if they "throttle" the search results if proxied. And as w/ Rasheed, I see noticeable delay too and it's another serious problem as I make dozens or even hundreds search per day. As a general search, still nothing beats Google, Bing comes in the distant 2nd place.
I can't get the dark theme to 'stick'. Could be one of my add-ons / settings, but just curious if anyone else is experiencing this?
This usually means your cookies are getting deleted. You could whitelist StartPage --- Does anyone else have the issue that the FireFox extension from StartPage blocks the whole website if active? It's weird.
I assume you also checked if Firefox deletes all history/data/cookies everytime it's closed... ("privacy.clearOnShutdown.cookies", false) Hm...What addons except uBlock and uMatrix do you have? I don't of any usual addons that delete cookies, though... *shrug* EDIT: "I can't get the dark theme to 'stick'." What does it exactly mean? Does it revert to white if you reload or only if you close the tab/window?
Set to 'Remember history'; quite a few other add-ons but not ones that I can see would manipulate cookies ... will continue to hunt it down.
What? Weird... Oh, maybe the site wasn't allowed to create a cookie? Like the script that writes it was blocked? Ok that makes sense.
Still a tad slower. This is a major thing for me, I tried them all and I settled for Qwant Lite. It's fast as google (not as thorough though), so I'm using it for a few months now. I wanted to try it, but for windows last update was on 2018-07-26. I'll pass. For regulary updated versions, I use https://chromium.woolyss.com/
I'm glad the addon, that I apparently need to have startpage in Firefox, started working again. While they were doing the transition it would never load that startpage site, even when I typed the URL manually. I had to use DDG, and I'm not a fan of their results.
Two observations: 1. Startpage now has uncensored search by default (good from my perspective), but 2. Image results are now hideous, with all image previews upscaled to full-screen, regardless of how blurry that makes them. They must now be downloaded to be viewed in real size. Since point 2 essentially negates point 1, I'm back to using DDG for image search, which was the main thing I used SP for