Subject: Re: PSA: Quick startup on the dedicated Duck.ai LLM/AI WebView2 chat mechanism

On Sun, 8/9/2026 2:34 PM, Maria Sophia wrote:

Maria Sophia wrote:

If you already use this interface, please let others know what you think.
If you know of an unlimited no-registration chat on Windows, let us know.

BTW, I don't understand "what" this DDG webview2-whatever-that-is thingamagidgy is actually because the shortcut TARGET turns out to
be a zero-length file, created today at install time. Huh?

How does a shortcut target that is a 0-length file, actually work? TARGET=C:\Users\...\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps\DuckDuckGo.exe

Dated today, are thse two related zero-sized additions:
C:\Users\{me}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps\DuckDuckGo.DesktopBrowser_ya2fgkz3nks94\DuckDuckGo.exe
But the hash on that empty file is an error:
Errors: 1
Files: 0
Size: 0 bytes
SHA256 checksum for data: 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
SHA256 checksum for data and names: 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

There is also an executable one level up though but of the same empty hash.
C:\Users\{me}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps\DuckDuckGo.exe

What the heck?
What is this DDG thingey anyway?

Moving on to testing... drat. After only a handful of turns, I get the error:
You've reached the maximum chat length in this conversation.
Start a new chat to continue.

Which means we have to start all over again. Sigh.

I'll flip some switches (e.g., Reasoning vs Fast and/or mini versus nano)
to see if the character limit is extended, but this is a big limitation
on complex research which requires the chat mechanism to remember stuff.

That's the packaging method for a Windows.App .

At one time, the "blah.exe" file was a PE32 stub with zero execution time,
that could cause the screen to flash. The file was actually a manifest file, with the manifest text staged after the PE32 stub.

They liked the scheme so much, they reduced "blah.exe" to zero length.
Now, you cannot click on it and make things blink. The manifest is
still in the folder, somewhere. The manifest has sufficient signing
and crypto, to ensure the thing loaded is "authentic" and has not
been modified. If a hash of a file is incorrect, that should trigger
a re-download of the materials.

And for some of those, the folder is "access denied". Making your
study of the materials a bit more difficult. That's not really a problem
of course.

The SHA checksum of a zero length file is not 0.
It would be Bad Karma if that were to be true.

Name: BadKarma
Size: 0 bytes
SHA256: E3B0C44298FC1C149AFBF4C8996FB92427AE41E4649B934CA495991B7852B855

What happened there might well be Access Denied.

I dare you, to make a source file, where the SHA256 output is all zeros :-) I'll wait. If you could do that, if you could manage to make an
all zeros SHA256 legitimately, all the Bitcoins in the world
would be worthless. A worthy objective.

Paul


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Subject: Re: PSA: Quick startup on the dedicated Duck.ai LLM/AI WebView2 chat mechanism

On Sun, 8/9/2026 10:34 PM, Maria Sophia wrote:

The only option is to turn off the automatic startup with Windows.

We later found out where (most of) the webview thingy went, where that's:
C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\DuckDuckGo.DesktopBrowser_0.168.2.0_x64__ya2fgkz3nks94\WindowsBrowser\DuckDuckGo.exe
C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\DuckDuckGo.DesktopBrowser_0.168.2.0_x64__ya2fgkz3nks94\WindowsBrowser\DuckDuckGo.WebView.exe

But I had to turn on the automatic startup, 'cuz is' pretty slow.
Dunno why. But it's very slow if it's not already running in the bg.

5. It seems to do nothing but usually I see some kind of error.
Often I see the default browser pop up phoning home at least.

It didn't phone home after the install (AFAIK), but that download
is just a stub so here is the full offline installer (AFAIK).
<https://staticcdn.duckduckgo.com/windows-desktop-browser/help-pages/DuckDuckGo.msixbundle>

Holy Moley! I's 1.22 Gigabytes! Why the heck is it that big?
<https://duckduckgo.en.uptodown.com/windows>
Date Aug 3, 2026
File type MSIXBUNDLE
Size 1.22 GB
SHA256 89d46b043e736eec41c344193bd284481009150f2705ed9b6a45b85b643d80da

(x)Play YouTube videos without ads

I generally use Aloha VPN browser to play YouTube on Windows sans ads.
Aloha is super fast, but it's the most dangerous VPN browser on the planet.

I will test out the YouTube with the DuckDuckGo browser 'cuz if it blocks YouTube ads, then it's a good alternative for most people who won't want
to write extensive scripts like I've had to do to keep Aloha on VPN.

11. It created a desktop shortcut:
Target
C:\Users\{you}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps\DuckDuckGo.exe

We've covered this where Paul and others know more than I do about it.
That seemingly zero-sized DuckDuckGo.exe target is a freaky thing.

I do not understand what it is, but Paul proved it's not zero size.
It's simply just something that Windows magic knows how to deal with.

Choices of {Fast, Reasoning}
Engines of Choices of= {GPT-5.4 nano,GPT-5.4 mini, Claude Haiku 4.5,
Mistral Small 4, gpt-oss 120B, Gemma 4 31B}
Advanced Models (requires DDG subscription) {GPT-5.4, Claude Sonnet
4.6}

So far I've been testing the "Reasoning" "GPT-5.4 mini".
Initially it seems kind of stupid compared to Copilot or Gemini.

But it takes getting used to any LLM to know where they're blind.
They're each good at some things and absolute morons in other things.

If you already use this interface, please let others know what you think.
If you know of an unlimited no-registration chat on Windows, let us know.

Those are my initial takes, admittedly only after using for a short while. Let us know what your take is on this dedicated ai browser from DDG.

Some of those seem to be local choices.

gpt-oss 120B Gemma 4 31B

The files for those are on the other machine.

The one on the left, the download for that performed OK.
The one on the right, the transfer kept stopping, I would
click Pause then Restore and the transfer would continue.

As for the package itself, at 1.22GB, I doubt Virustotal will
even scan that :-)

Paul



--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)