@DavidKelsey
I occassionally use DuckDuckGo on my MacBook Pro and the experience is similar, with DDG's tracking prevention doing its "magic", as Safari.
What I can say is that a lot of Canvas itself works on almost every major web browser, as long as it is as upto date as possible. What complicates the experience is when third-party tools are added to a Canvas course. This is something I have even seen happen when using Google Chrome when security/privacy settings are too restrictive.
From my quick testing, I was able to use DDG to access some third-party resources but not all of them.
My recommendation would be: Use DDG but also have another supported web browser at your fingertips incase something is not working.
-Doug