As you may have seen, DuckDuckGo finally released a beta version of its web browser on Windows, fully 8 months after the Mac version. As advertised, it offers terrific privacy protections, including superior tracker blocking. But it’s light on necessary usability features, making it more of an experiment than a viable product. For now.

But as a Brave user for almost a full year now, DuckDuckGo still impresses. It offers an even more minimalist user interface and what appears to be a similar level of tracker blocking out of the box. Other browsers—Edge and Chrome especially—need multiple extension installs to achieve this level of protection, while others like Vivaldi need to be configured correctly. Put simply, the audience that knows about and is interested in DuckDuckGo is getting exactly what they expect.

But DuckDuckGo also offers some unique protections. When you click on a video on YouTube, for example, you are prompted to use something called Duck Player instead of the default playback experience. Duck Player removes targeted advertisements, which prevents YouTube from using your viewing activity from influencing your recommendations. Duck Player is really nice: it takes up most of the browser window by default and the player sits above an empty, non-busy background devoid of the usual YouTube distractions. It’s not clear yet (to me) if it blocks all YouTube ads, but I didn’t sign into my account (which removes the ads) and never saw any ads.

The browser also includes the other expected DuckDuckGo privacy features, like the Fire button, which immediately clears all of your recent browsing data, cookie protection and automatic hiding of cookie-based consent dialogs, automatic encryption on all websites, and email protection, which requires you to use an @duck.com account when you signup for services online.

From a rendering and compatibility perspective, the DuckDuckGo browser seems to work perfectly, with the caveat that my experience is limited so far. But all of the sites I normally visit look and work normally (i.e. as they do in other Chromium-based browsers). That’s obviously a base line.

Where the DuckDuckGo browser falls apart for now is in usability, as there are so many obvious and necessary features that aren’t yet available. For example, when you first run the browser, it offers to import your bookmarks and passwords, and it successfully did so from Brave. But it cannot import any other browser data, like other browsers do, and there is no ability to sync your settings through some account—or by using an even better system like the one in Brave—meaning that each instance of the browser is, in effect, a siloed island unto itself.

As bad, the DuckDuckGo browser doesn’t yet support extensions. Granted, the functionality provided by the most important extensions is already built into the browser. But everyone, myself included, needs more than that. There are other smaller features missing, too, like the ability to pin tabs or run websites as apps. That the Settings interface is just a single page is telling, and I’m sure the deeper you look, the more you’ll find.

The good news? This is all coming. DuckDuckGo says that private syncing across devices (including secure password management), extensions, and other features are all coming soon. But soon isn’t now, and some of the missing features will temporarily make the browser a non-starter for most.

Still. This is intriguing. I’ve been very, very happy with Brave and have no incentive to switch. But this browser is shaping up to be one that offers the same protections as Brave along with an even more minimalist UI and unique features that I like, such as the Duck Player. You never know.

For now, I recommend at least checking it out: we all spend a lot of time in web browsers, and choosing a safe and private web browser is job one. On that note, DuckDuckGo already nails the basics. It will just depend on which features it adds and when.