Yes, every application has access to everything. The only exception are those weird apps that use the universal framework or whatever that thing is called, those need to ask for permissions. But most of the apps on your PC have full access to everything.
And Windows does collect and upload a lot of personal information and they could easily upload everything on your system. The same of course applies for the apps as well, they have access to everything except privileged folders (those usually don't contain your personal data, but system files).
I've been using Vivaldi as my logged in browser for years. I like the double tab bar groups, session management, email client, sidebar and tab bar on mobile. It is strange to me that tab bar isn't a thing on mobile on other browsers despite phones having way more vertical space than computers. Although for internet searches I use a seperate lighter weight browser that clears its data on close.
Ecosia also been using for years. For a while it was geniunely better than the other search engines I had tried but nowadays it's worse since it started to return google translate webpage translation links based on search region instead of the webpages themselves. Also not sure what to think about the counter they readded after removing it to reduce the emphasis on quantity over quality like a year ago.
I don't use duckduckgo as its name and the way privacy communities used to obsess about it made me distrust it for some reason
