9 ms·

Orion Browser by Kagi

304 points by sebjones 3mo ago

jesse_dot_id 3mo ago
Love Kagi the search engine, Helium is the better browser.
sebjones 3mo ago
Been looking for a browser to replace Chrome which is very difficult I know. But Chrome just gets so bloated that my M1 Macbook Air is not able to run it anymore. How good is this browser in terms of actual daily performance?
- coffeefirst 3mo ago
  It’s fast but it has just enough rough edges that I always go back to Firefox.
- Gecko4072 3mo ago
  Great concept but buggy so not a daily option imo
  - smohare 3mo ago
    I’ve used it daily almost since it was released without any real issues. But I generally do not run too many extensions or probably push the limits of my browsers. For me, Orion’s vertical tabs are the best out of the box of all the browsers I’ve tried since I prefer their arbitrary nesting.
    - MrDrMcCoy 3mo ago
      Depends on the platform, I expect. I love the feature set and layout, but it's been unusable for me as a daily driver on Linux from various bugs. I'll be giving it another honest go when it's out of beta.
- herrherrmann 3mo ago
  You should try Firefox or Waterfox then!
  - arvid-lind 3mo ago
    also worth checking out Librewolf: https://www.librewolf.net/ https://www.librewolf.net/
- throw1234567891 3mo ago
  F… irefox?
- Cider9986 3mo ago
  Brave is the best balance of privacy, security, and usability. I recommend it.
  - arvid-lind 3mo ago
    Been a big fan Brave for a while. I just recently learned about Brave Origin, the core browser with all the crypto/ads/etc removed, free for linux and one-time payment for others: https://brave.com/origin/ https://brave.com/origin/
  - johanyc 3mo ago
    Yeah brave is a well rounded browser. It's the only chrome alternative imo
- pasc1878 3mo ago
  I have just switched from Orion to Vivaldi partially as it seems to use less memory. I suspect this is because I use several profiles amd each one in Orion is in effect a copy of the whole Orion browser whilst in Vivaldi less things a re duplicated. Or possibly my style of when to close things works better wehn an app has many profiles like Vivaldo or Safari rather than each profile is an app like Orion or Firefox.
- trvz 3mo ago
  That computer, even with only 8GB RAM, should still handle Chrome well. You may have something bad installed or something misconfigured.
  - BLKNSLVR 3mo ago
    That was my thought. It was only released in 2020, and to great performance fanfare. To be 'not able to run it anymore' seems like it could be infested with a number of undesirables.
- frizlab 3mo ago
  Why not Safari? It works great (it is my main browser).
  - khana 3mo ago
    [dead]
  - themadturk 3mo ago
    I use Safari all the time as well, but it doesn't behave very well with Reddit (keeps closing and reopening tabs due to "too much memory" problems. Other than that, it works for 99.9% of everything else.
    - cosmic_cheese 3mo ago
      Usually when sites get reloaded after sitting for a while due to “too much memory” it means the site has a memory leak (or several) that it’s owner has chosen to not address. Annoying regardless, but arguably Safari is doing the right thing here.
      - themadturk 3mo ago
        Yeah, I'm sure you're right. Still irritating. I tend to use Firefox for Reddit now.
- khana 3mo ago
  [dead]
- apparent 3mo ago
  I have hundreds of open tabs in Brave at all times on my M2 MBA and it's fine. It puts tabs to sleep when inactive and is generally quite usable. Also supports all the same extensions as Chrome (plus older ones that Chrome doesn't support).
fooqux 3mo ago
> WebKit. > A web browser designed from the ground-up. Both of these can't be true. Perhaps they're thinking of Ladybird?
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- KPGv2 3mo ago
  WebKit is a rendering engine, not a browser. It's a bit like saying "that isn't original art because you used Earth physics that govern how paint flows and dries.
  - mattmcal 3mo ago
    The particular choice of the marketing phrase "from the ground up" sort of invites this kind of commentary on HN. This is hardly the first WebKit-based browser, so any commenter specifically holding their breath for a new, independent rendering and layout engine or JS engine might feel inclined to roll their eyes and snark.
  - mdlxxv 3mo ago
    I dunno. It's more like saying "that isn't your original art because you didn't paint it, only provided the frame". A pretty elaborate frame, yes, but only the frame, not the painting.
    - danpalmer 3mo ago
      I think this is underselling the browser UX. In many ways, Safari, Orion, Chrome, Brave, Opera, are all very different products despite all sharing the WebKit lineage.
      - doodlesdev 3mo ago
        Chrome, Brave and Opera are as much WebKit as Safari and Kagi Orion are KHTML. I wholeheartly agree on the UX part, though.
arvid-lind 3mo ago
Was the Linux version just released or something? afaik Orion on iOS and Mac is nothing new.
- rav3ndust 3mo ago
  it's been in beta on linux since early this year
  - frizlab 3mo ago
    And they have announced having funded a team for Orion on windows at the end of 2025. https://orionfeedback.org/d/2321-orion-for-windows-android-linux https://orionfeedback.org/d/2321-orion-for-windows-android-l...
    - rav3ndust 3mo ago
      i remember seeing this thread. will be cool for windows users to have a webkit option again (are there any webkit-based browsers there since safari quit being made for it?). i will certainly be interested in trying out the android version when it comes around and have been testing out the linux version since it dropped.
      - Apocryphon 3mo ago
        GNOME Web, technically, through WSL.
        rav3ndust 3mo ago
        haha, that is certainly one way to achieve the goal. :)
villish 3mo ago
The best feature is being able to use Firefox extensions and thus uBlock Origin and sponsorblock on iOS. It's a little buggy but worth it for me.
- Cyberdog 3mo ago
  SponsorBlock has a native Safari/iOS extension that works fine.
  - frizlab 3mo ago
    I use 1Blocker which works very well too.
- JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
  > best feature is being able to use Firefox extensions “The only browser supporting Safari, Chrome, and Firefox extensions.”
  - MrAlex94 3mo ago
    It isn’t really, just marketing fluff. Foxify[1] allowed Firefox to install Chrome extensions almost a decade ago and then I ported that to Waterfox after privileged extension support was removed from Firefox 56. Currently still in Waterfox stable but figured there’s not actual much advantage to supporting Chrome extensions as Firefox ones are more featureful, so have removed it in the final version based on ESR 153 - albeit would be trivial to add support back in. [1] https://github.com/bnpoirier/foxify https://github.com/bnpoirier/foxify
- hirvi74 3mo ago
  Safari has UBlock Origin by the same original Raymond Hill. I've had create success with it. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id6745342698 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...
  - buzer 3mo ago
salmonik 3mo ago
Where's the source code for their browser? Such move of not publishing it is almost bizarre for such a pro-privacy company.
- margalabargala 3mo ago
  Kagi is not a pro privacy company except inasmuch as they currently consider privacy to be profitable. They are a would-be AI company who discovered paid search was a viable way to self-fund. If you ask them what guarantees you have that they won't someday decide to sell your search history, their response will be "well, it doesn't make financial sense for us to do so. Now drop it" and ban you. Here's a blog post someone wrote about this with examples: https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
  - greggoB 3mo ago
    > If you ask them what guarantees you have that they won't someday decide to sell your search history, their response will be "well, it doesn't make financial sense for us to do so. Now drop it" and ban you. Can you provide any evidence of them having done this? As a paying Kagi subscriber, I am surely interested in knowing more.
    - margalabargala 3mo ago
      If you click the link in my earlier comment, the author of that post goes into that including screenshots from the Kagi discord. It's the last thing before the postmortem. > and ban you I was wrong about the banning; I misremembered that.
      - greggoB 3mo ago
        Strange, I don't remember seeing the blog post link there - I must have just skipped over that. In general I found some parts provided interesting info (e.g. Kagi bought a t-shirt producer, Kagi started out as an AI company in 2018), both with links to Kagi's own blog articles; some I found a bit naive (the tax stuff, which can easily be the case and doesn't have to be a conspiracy); and some just politics between the author and the Kagi founder. In general a lot of it came down to how the author feels about Kagi, by my estimation at least. > I was wrong about the banning; I misremembered that. Sort of a big thing to accuse them of and then realize you just "misremembered". At a min you could edit your earlier comment to note this.
mid-kid 3mo ago
Is the source code published anywhere?
- salmonik 3mo ago
  They have a github organization[0] but without explicit source code for the browser. [0] https://github.com/OrionBrowser https://github.com/OrionBrowser
ares623 3mo ago
No password manager built-in yet. Although I suppose I really should migrate to Apple's native password manager nowadays.
- doublebash 3mo ago
  I had used the built-in password managers in browsers for years when using Android. Since I switched to iPhone, I couldn’t be happier with Apple Passwords.
  - datakan 3mo ago
    It’s not bad but the lack of secure notes kills it for me. Unusable without that as far as I’m concerned.
    - themadturk 3mo ago
      That's my issue as well.
- dotancohen 3mo ago
  Don't marry yourself to the Apple (or any other large vendor) ecosystem. I use Keepass variants on my Linux and Android devices, it's absolutely terrific.
  - ares623 3mo ago
    Yeah. Right after typing that I was reminded how much of a nightmare trying to recover access to an Apple account is. I recently had to do it for a friend and it was nerve wracking, there was a very real chance of being permanently locked out if you take the wrong step.
regecks 3mo ago
Any chance Apple Private Relay still works? That’s why I stick to Safari. Am a paying Kagi user.
- TingPing 3mo ago
  That’s a feature of Safari itself.
Cyberdog 3mo ago
I'm giving it a try after a couple months of daily driving with Zen, which I've become quite fond of. One potential deal-breaker is that it seems to be impossible to log into GitHub. After autofilling my credentials from the keychain, the form submits, and then I get redirected right back to the form with no error message. The same thing happens when I try logging in with my passkey. Has anyone else run into this and found a workaround? I tried turning off auto-submitting password forms in the Settings but that doesn't change anything.
teravor 3mo ago
one of their "Curated Extensions" is Tampermonkey, a non open source userscript engine. when there are multiple open ones available. like attracts like?
- applfanboysbgon 3mo ago
  Okay...? Do you believe you're entitled to everyone's code for free?
  - helterskelter 3mo ago
    Do you believe closed-source software is entitled to people's usage and good opinion? Who wants to use a privacy-focused browser which isn't FOSS in this day and age, especially given the mature alternatives?
    - carlosjobim 3mo ago
      Billions of people.
- kmfrk 3mo ago
  People also generally use Violentmonkey (https://violentmonkey.github.io https://violentmonkey.github.io) instead nowadays.
- roundabout-host 3mo ago
  The browser itself is nonfree. I would not be surprised with it promoting more nonfree software.
TechRemarker 3mo ago
Tried switching a while back. It's like Safari but with so many little UI improvements that make it so much more enjoyable but while still feeling like something Apple would design. Alas didn't use long as lack to many things such as no native Apple Pay support (have to use iOS or scan a code etc), or 2fa email/sms auto fill, private relay support, doesn't fully support 1Password, and so on. Most all of which because of Apple limitations but still little things that I value more than the better UI. However, far more important than all of that is so many sites didn't work. With Chrome you know a site will work, with Safari you know a lot may not, but with Orion it was an enormous number of sites that continually ran into issues and unlike Safari too many to keep reporting or find work arounds. All the benefits of Safari make it worth the downside of some sites not working properly, but the benefits of Orion over Safari for the massive number that didn't work right was certainly not worth it for me. Which was all unfortunate since the Orion team is doing everything they can essentially on their end. Hopefully they have a large enough niche to stick around and offer even modest competition for the big players.
- JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
  > such as no native Apple Pay Apple Pay is now supported [1]. [1] https://x.com/vladquant/status/1866659950921191550 https://x.com/vladquant/status/1866659950921191550
- loehnsberg 3mo ago
  I am using Orion on Mac and iOS for a few years now and I cannot disagree more. If a site works on Safari but not on Orion it is mostly due to ad blockers etc. Just flick the compatibility mode and it works. I have not encountered a single case where this did not fix it. Also for a while now Apple Pay works, Apple password manager works, autofill works.
  - lanamo 3mo ago
    +1 - using Orion on iOS & MacOs for a few years and i like it!
cyanydeez 3mo ago
The Linux ARM64 appears to only be for AArch. Ubuntu has a snapdragon X Elite version.
TiredOfLife 3mo ago
Skip the middleman and just use Yandex browser. It has great free video dubbing feature
- MrDrMcCoy 3mo ago
  In the same way that I'm uncomfortable with Opera since it went Chinese and Chrome from all its corporate spyware, I'll be skipping over the Russian stuff.
  - TiredOfLife 3mo ago
    Kagi is unapologetically russian, as in russian government throug yandex, connected
spaghettifythis 3mo ago
My main gripe with this is the pretty shocking performance on old "supported" iOS devices (e.g. an iPhone SE 2). When you have too many tabs, or watch more than a couple videos it just starts freezing and will sometimes crash the phone - you get an unresponsive sideshow screen for a bit before it goes to the lock screen with fingerprint login disabled (like after a restart). I can only assume they've accidentally found a way to make webkit leak memory?
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- droserasprout 3mo ago
  I find it shocking that it works fine on a totally unsupported iPhone 7 (2016). With extensions! Not the latest build (unfortunately, they bumped the minimum iOS version to 17.0 recently), and I haven't stress-tested it with many tabs, but still.
8jy89hui 3mo ago
I tried using Orion mobile for months but I just kept running into so many UI bugs that I had to switch away from it :(. I love Kagi, but Orion just feels unpolished right now
- hodapp 3mo ago
  Same for me. It was just so full of glitches - UI not responding, refusing to scroll, menu being inaccessible, pages somehow producing looping pop-up dialogs about not being able to render right and blocking the rest of the app...
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 3mo ago
    Interesting, I get occasional glitches, mainly around placement of the text bar, but they are visual and don’t affect behavior. I’ve been living on the browser on iOS for about a year now and I enjoy it. I did eventually have to abandon the desktop one about a year ago though due to bugs. It seems like it’s better now though.
- laweijfmvo 3mo ago
  ditto, it’s just not stable or usable at all for me.
- calmingsolitude 3mo ago
  I still use it because I like how easy it is to use extensions on iOS but definitely agree that there are a lot of UI bugs. Listing the most prominent ones just in case the dev is around: - At times, the search bar text disappears and the "refresh page" icon is left aligned (instead of right aligned). - When a link has an associated app that can open it, Orion opens a modal that asks whether you'd like to open it in-app or continue on the browser. However, sometimes it immediately opens the app and shows the modal once you navigate back. - When using a custom search engine, you can no longer use the search bar to edit your query and it just shows the url.
- whereistejas 3mo ago
  that was my experience as well. in my case, i kept running into issues with using chrome plugins.
sodapopcan 3mo ago
I paid the one-time fee that gives you lifetime access to it over a year ago and it's been at least a year that I haven't used it (It was like $270USD or something... I can't remember). I wanted to, and still want to, like it so badly but there were just too many bugs and I have been using Firefox since. Every once in a while I come back to Orion to see what's up... Now... this is likely going to sound extremely stupid to many HNers, but the thing that makes me immediately quit is that I can't make the vertical tab bar as small as the width of the icons themselves (Orion forces extra left/right padding to accommodate the small row of buttons at the top). This is 100% a UI thing (and explicitly not a UX thing, per se) but there is just something about the ultra-thin, vertical tab strip that Firefox allows (and some other browers I might add) that... I just love it. It's so stupid, I know, but it just gets right out of my way. And as someone who always has tons of tabs open: this is exactly what my tab looked liked in my horizontal tab bar days. Anyway, that's all. Still love Kagi as a company. Zero regrets I gave them a bunch of money for a browser I don't use. I'm still hoping to make the switch one day! Oh... also that whole webkit thing that puts the URL in the centre and then it moves to the left... that shit sucks. This was one of my big problems when I tried out Zen. Just make it so I can edit the URL immediately with one click and no animation (and I'm not even anti-animation generally). Like... just do it. **in' **.
- freediver 3mo ago
  I appreciate that you are very particular about UI. Have you considered opening a thread on orionfeedback.org and sharing some of the thoughts/ideas? And thanks for the support, being completely user-funded is what makes developing Orion fun!
  - sodapopcan 3mo ago
    I have considered it, yes, lol. I'll do so. I've reported things in the past but I'm one of those people who feels like they're being a giant pain reporting too many things, especially something like this that I view as very low priority for most people. But hey, who knows! Premature EDIT: oh, you're Vlad, lol. Thanks for the nudge! :D
  - 3mo ago
technovangelist 3mo ago
I only started using it about 6 months ago so I don't know what it was like before, but today it's a solid choice. far less problematic than Chrome or Firefox or Arc or Dia or Brave or any of the other browsers I had on my system. Orion was the first browser that let me delete all the rest and haven't run into any issues in months. Some of the other comments show they hadn't used it in a long time. 1Password works perfectly as does Apple Pay.
- nklmilojevic 3mo ago
  which 1password extension works perfectly? I have the latest Orion browser and it is buggy like before - sometimes doesn't show up, it has like 5fps and works half of the time.
cute_boi 3mo ago
I will suggest people to use helium browser over this closed source browser. I know kagi is good company, but i don't understand why they aren't open sourcing browser.
xando 3mo ago
Happy Kagi user. I switched to Orion at some point, but due to bugs and battery drain, I had to switch back (to Safari!) As soon as those are fixed, I’m back again. I’d also pay for it, if that changes anything. Actually, I would pay for the browser, period, if it was good, respected privacy, was efficient and fast on mobile, and synced things between devices.
mediumsmart 3mo ago
Using it for years on iOS and Mac. Works great and the only zero telemetry browser. Apple Pay works and the compatibility button fixes any problem site worth loading. No complaints.
- kqp 3mo ago
  Not only. Others include LibreWolf, Waterfox, Zen, Tor, I’m sure others.
  - mediumsmart 3mo ago
    fair enough - librewolf - same as Orion: 18.29 fingerprint uniqueness - I dont know the other browsers except Tor. I use librewolf too with privacy badger and librejs - good browser
yellowapple 3mo ago
The Linux beta feels nice. Built-in ad-blocking and nested vertical tabs satisfies the two main things keeping me on Firefox (unnerfed uBlock Origin and Tree Style Tabs, respectively). Some things feel like obvious oversights, like the lack of “Search for...” when right-clicking on selected text. Also some of the settings pages are broken (like the one with per-site settings), though I assume this is just a quirk of it being a test build. The only showstopper is the lack of publicly-available source code. Transparency is a dependency of trust. As much as I want to trust Kagi's browser (I certainly have trusted them enough to be paying them every month for their search engine + AI), web browsers are the biggest attack surface on a modern desktop, and I'd be a lot more comfortable with my daily browsing being done with a user agent that has nothing to hide. I don't even necessarily need it to be FOSS (though that'd be preferable); source-available would be enough.
- matheusmoreira 3mo ago
  > Built-in ad-blocking Definitely enjoying this trend. I think Brave was the first to do it, and now Kagi is doing it too in their own browser. The web without adblocking is so unusable it might as well be considered broken. Ad blockers are the new popup blockers: they should be built into the browsers themselves as first class features. Only conflicts of interest prevented that. Couldn't trust a company funded by Google to maintain an ad blocker. I'm so glad alternatives are showing up.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - c16 3mo ago
    As an ad-blocker user for years, I agree. On the flip side, how do blogs, news, and every day ad-serving websites survive without them? If it dies, it dies? Maybe this is not a discussion for here right now. But it's definitely something I've thought of. Not everyone want to pay for news.
    - JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
sedatk 3mo ago
Still waiting for the Windows version.
steadyfall04 3mo ago
i’ve been daily-driving this on my iphone for almost 9 months now & its amazing. the built-in adblocker works wonders and fwiw, i haven’t faced that many bugs compared to what i see from other users. this is despite having had 1k-1.3k tabs open for prolonged periods (1+ months) and being able to search/browse through them easily.
onion2k 3mo ago
A good webkit-based browser on Windows might mean people actually start bothering to test things in that browser family. It can be done today but it's a little bit of a pain and it lags behind Safari by some margin. Run `npx playwright wk <url>` if you have Playwright set up.
cantalopes 3mo ago
I am not supporting kagi since i found out they fund putin's war via yandex that is fully owned ditrctly by state
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- dewey 3mo ago
  That's fair to make as a personal choice, but full context is also important: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integration-due-to-the-geopolitical-status-quo/19 https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
  - lostlogin 3mo ago
    I really wish there was a way to support their amazing product without a cent going the way of the Russian government. I get that there is a stance being taken, and it's an attempt to be apolitical, but that's in itself a political choice.
    - Razengan 3mo ago
      I wish there was a way to use American products without a cent going to fund American wars, police militarization or global spying.
      - omnimus 3mo ago
        My thoughts exactly. And unfortunazely to be able even to access Kagi you gonna need to give US gov money in multiple places.
      - TiredOfLife 3mo ago
        Putting what russia does in same sentence as what america does, shows that you are either intentionally trolling or severely handicaped.
roundabout-host 3mo ago
I find it interesting that it uses GTK, something quite unusual for a proprietary app. In any case, I am not using it, because I don't want to use a nonfree WWW browser.
- antnisp 3mo ago
  Surprisingly, this is what the Webkit project uses for Linux, so that's why they chose it too.
  - asadotzler 3mo ago
    Webkit started as a fork of KDE's KHTML and KJS. It makes good sense.
    - ssl-3 3mo ago
      AFAIK, KHTML used Qt, not GTK. :)
  - mghackerlady 3mo ago
    That and Webkit on unix is almost entirely worked on by GNOME people
Razengan 3mo ago
Looks like we're back in the 1990s with everyone and their grandma making a browser To farm that sweet data to sell to AI trainers is it?
luciana1u 3mo ago
[flagged]
shepherdjerred 3mo ago
I want to love Orion but it’s just too buggy. I went back to Safari
- mholm 3mo ago
  Yeah. I also noticed a fairly significant speed increase when I started using Safari again. Unfortunate. There are just too many features that Safari supports perfectly, that Orion either doesn't support at all, or has flakey support for. Especially the Apple ecosystem ones, which I'd think Apple doesn't expose, but Chrome seems to support some of them just fine, like 2fa codes.
  - freediver 3mo ago
    We'd like to hear more about that - I've been using Orion for the last 6 years and checking Safari every month, cant say Safari ever felt faster than Orion. Must be a specific use case. So if you can be conrete in providing feedback, that would indeed be valuable.
est 3mo ago
I hope it brings back ManifestV2 (or something even better). Let users switch to a cleaner Web.
- freediver 3mo ago
  Orion already supports it.
swiftcoder 3mo ago
Curious whether they will upstream windows support. WebKit really needs a decent rendering backend on Windows, would unlock a whole world
- freediver 3mo ago
  https://form.kagi.com/orion-windows-newsletter https://form.kagi.com/orion-windows-newsletter
EchooAI 3mo ago
I tried the browser, and honestly, it works very fast and is very convenient. I will give it a one week trial, and give Arc a one week break. Let's see how this develops.
haarolean 3mo ago
[dead]
rpastuszak 3mo ago
Has it gotten any better in the past 6 months on Mac (UI glitches, password management)? I really want to use it but basic things like password management kept breaking (I even tried switching between different options, like BitWarden - no luck).
- radicalriddler 3mo ago
  Yeah, bitwarden just not filling fields at all is still broken
cpt_sobel 3mo ago
Can anyone explain how they support all 3 browsers' extensions?
- freediver 3mo ago
  7 years of stubborn development.
angry_octet 3mo ago
"Zero Compromise Privacy" vs "Seamless integration with all Kagi services directly in your browser." Search and translate (and browse?) traces from authentic humans sounds valuable.
aquir 3mo ago
Very fast and good UI but the iCloud passwords integration is very poor :(
vanyaland 3mo ago
Safari has used the same WebExtensions API as Chrome and Firefox since Safari 14. So is the hard part API coverage rather than three engines?
xacky 3mo ago
It's just a webkit wrapper, not a new engine like Servo and Ladybird.
- gen2brain 3mo ago
  Yes, and you need an army of people to "wrap" WebKit just like that. E.g., the WebKit port on Haiku, of course, is not in good shape because it has more code than the whole of their OS. EFL once had a WebBrowser control/component, maintained by Tizen devs, but of course, it has now been removed. There is no manpower to maintain such control.
- mrweasel 3mo ago
  At least it's WebKit and not just a reskin of Chrome, but I don't exactly get why Kagi feel that they need to develop their own browser. Personally I prefer my search and browser to be developed be separate entities that can focus on doing one thing really well.
blacklime 3mo ago
These people seriously need to stop. Kagi, Rust, Claude. Just stop. You are not innovators.
__alexs 3mo ago
So glad I stopped wasting my subscription fee on these stupid vanity projects.
assimpleaspossi 3mo ago
Not available for BSD though one might be able to run it through the Linuxalator on FreeBSD at least.
Boxxed 3mo ago
Why does everyone use webkit instead of gecko? Is gecko hard to work with or something?
- LoganDark 3mo ago
  Is there a reason to make a gecko browser that's not a fork of Firefox?
  - Boxxed 3mo ago
    Probably the same reason that people use webkit rather than fork chromium?
    - LoganDark 3mo ago
      What? WebKit and Blink are very different now.
arthurtully 3mo ago
iCloud Bookmarks would be an easy reason to switch. SlimBrave rn works great, but I have to do workarounds via Edge to sync bookmarks to iOS Safari.
mghackerlady 3mo ago
I really, really hope they release the source for this, if not just the code for extensions so Epiphany can finally be usable for more than basic websearch
theoneone 3mo ago
I switched from brave(ios) to Orion about a month ago and almost I didn't look back. Some ui bug and certain website bit playing along(reddit) but it's OK.
- deaton 3mo ago
  Unfortunately, as long as Chromium has as much market share as it does, nobody will bother to make their websites compatible with anything else.
deaton 3mo ago
A browser option that isn't a Chromium reskin and isn't Firefox... it does seem like a while since we've seen one of those. I've used Kagi a bit and I've been pretty impressed with how well they desloppify their results. I might have to give this a try.
hmokiguess 3mo ago
I have permanently switched to https://github.com/imputnet/helium https://github.com/imputnet/helium for a while now and have been quite happy with it. That said, I still think the browser market is garbage for consumers.
- plutokras 3mo ago
  What's the unique value proposition here? I checked it out and seems like yet another Chromium fork with some privacy added on top.
  - hmokiguess 3mo ago
    It's kinda like ungoogled chromium with some defaults and opinions baked-in, the website explains better https://helium.computer/ https://helium.computer/ Totally agree with you that is yet another fork with some privacy added on top, which is why I'm still not satisfied as a consumer with the market.
espetro 3mo ago
> The only browser supporting Safari, Chrome, and Firefox extensions Honestly it's nuts you've cracked a way to support all three of Safari, Chrome and Firefox extensions. In my experience while developing browser extensions, providing support for all three is somewhat of a headache. Care to share more insights on how you did it, or even launching/supporting a browser extension framework to ship browser extensions?
- freediver 3mo ago
  It was a design goal since we started working on it in 2019. (because why not?) It is basically a matter of time and devotion - we invested 7 years of development into it and while still not perfect (this is an incredibly messy problem!) a lot of people enjoy running their favorite extensions, even on iOS, which is truly unique to Orion.
nunez 3mo ago
Tried Orion again two weeks ago. It's almost there for me, but the lack of history sync between devices and its battery consumption are dealbreakers for me. I love it otherwise!!!
- freediver 3mo ago
  Orion syncs history, natively though iCloud sync. Battery consumption should be on par or better than Safari (because Orion has native ad-clocking). If this isn't the case, it is unusual and worth digging deeper into.
  - nunez 3mo ago
    Hey, Vlad! History did not sync between Orion on my MacBook and Orion on my iPhone. Bookmarks synced, however. I was running the latest version on all devices. Perhaps it's PEBKAC; I'll give it another go, as using Orion was an excellent experience otherwise.
singpolyma3 3mo ago
Another webkit skin pretending to be a browser.
tunapizza 3mo ago
I'm a heavy user of Google Drive, Docs, Sheets etc. for work. Does the suite work better with Orion now? It's the one thing that forced me off of Orion and back to Firefox. Or perhaps I need to really invest in finding a functional alternative to the Google suite. And I'm reading that Orion supports containers now, which is a feature I also love.
pickleglitch 3mo ago
"Orion Everywhere You Are!" Unless you are on on Android, I guess.
nipperkinfeet 3mo ago
Not available on Windows. DOA.
Candoa 2mo ago
[flagged]

304 points by sebjones 3mo ago

Love Kagi the search engine, Helium is the better browser.

Been looking for a browser to replace Chrome which is very difficult I know. But Chrome just gets so bloated that my M1 Macbook Air is not able to run it anymore. How good is this browser in terms of actual daily performance?

coffeefirst 3mo ago
It’s fast but it has just enough rough edges that I always go back to Firefox.
Gecko4072 3mo ago
Great concept but buggy so not a daily option imo
- smohare 3mo ago
  I’ve used it daily almost since it was released without any real issues. But I generally do not run too many extensions or probably push the limits of my browsers. For me, Orion’s vertical tabs are the best out of the box of all the browsers I’ve tried since I prefer their arbitrary nesting.
  - MrDrMcCoy 3mo ago
    Depends on the platform, I expect. I love the feature set and layout, but it's been unusable for me as a daily driver on Linux from various bugs. I'll be giving it another honest go when it's out of beta.
herrherrmann 3mo ago
You should try Firefox or Waterfox then!
- arvid-lind 3mo ago
  also worth checking out Librewolf: https://www.librewolf.net/ https://www.librewolf.net/
throw1234567891 3mo ago
F… irefox?
Cider9986 3mo ago
Brave is the best balance of privacy, security, and usability. I recommend it.
- arvid-lind 3mo ago
  Been a big fan Brave for a while. I just recently learned about Brave Origin, the core browser with all the crypto/ads/etc removed, free for linux and one-time payment for others: https://brave.com/origin/ https://brave.com/origin/
- johanyc 3mo ago
  Yeah brave is a well rounded browser. It's the only chrome alternative imo
pasc1878 3mo ago
I have just switched from Orion to Vivaldi partially as it seems to use less memory. I suspect this is because I use several profiles amd each one in Orion is in effect a copy of the whole Orion browser whilst in Vivaldi less things a re duplicated. Or possibly my style of when to close things works better wehn an app has many profiles like Vivaldo or Safari rather than each profile is an app like Orion or Firefox.
trvz 3mo ago
That computer, even with only 8GB RAM, should still handle Chrome well. You may have something bad installed or something misconfigured.
- BLKNSLVR 3mo ago
  That was my thought. It was only released in 2020, and to great performance fanfare. To be 'not able to run it anymore' seems like it could be infested with a number of undesirables.
frizlab 3mo ago
Why not Safari? It works great (it is my main browser).
- khana 3mo ago
  [dead]
- themadturk 3mo ago
  I use Safari all the time as well, but it doesn't behave very well with Reddit (keeps closing and reopening tabs due to "too much memory" problems. Other than that, it works for 99.9% of everything else.
  - cosmic_cheese 3mo ago
    Usually when sites get reloaded after sitting for a while due to “too much memory” it means the site has a memory leak (or several) that it’s owner has chosen to not address. Annoying regardless, but arguably Safari is doing the right thing here.
    - themadturk 3mo ago
      Yeah, I'm sure you're right. Still irritating. I tend to use Firefox for Reddit now.
khana 3mo ago
[dead]
apparent 3mo ago
I have hundreds of open tabs in Brave at all times on my M2 MBA and it's fine. It puts tabs to sleep when inactive and is generally quite usable. Also supports all the same extensions as Chrome (plus older ones that Chrome doesn't support).

fooqux 3mo ago

> WebKit. > A web browser designed from the ground-up. Both of these can't be true. Perhaps they're thinking of Ladybird?

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
KPGv2 3mo ago
WebKit is a rendering engine, not a browser. It's a bit like saying "that isn't original art because you used Earth physics that govern how paint flows and dries.
- mattmcal 3mo ago
  The particular choice of the marketing phrase "from the ground up" sort of invites this kind of commentary on HN. This is hardly the first WebKit-based browser, so any commenter specifically holding their breath for a new, independent rendering and layout engine or JS engine might feel inclined to roll their eyes and snark.
- mdlxxv 3mo ago
  I dunno. It's more like saying "that isn't your original art because you didn't paint it, only provided the frame". A pretty elaborate frame, yes, but only the frame, not the painting.
  - danpalmer 3mo ago
    I think this is underselling the browser UX. In many ways, Safari, Orion, Chrome, Brave, Opera, are all very different products despite all sharing the WebKit lineage.
    - doodlesdev 3mo ago
      Chrome, Brave and Opera are as much WebKit as Safari and Kagi Orion are KHTML. I wholeheartly agree on the UX part, though.

arvid-lind 3mo ago

Was the Linux version just released or something? afaik Orion on iOS and Mac is nothing new.

rav3ndust 3mo ago
it's been in beta on linux since early this year
- frizlab 3mo ago
  And they have announced having funded a team for Orion on windows at the end of 2025. https://orionfeedback.org/d/2321-orion-for-windows-android-linux https://orionfeedback.org/d/2321-orion-for-windows-android-l...
  - rav3ndust 3mo ago
    i remember seeing this thread. will be cool for windows users to have a webkit option again (are there any webkit-based browsers there since safari quit being made for it?). i will certainly be interested in trying out the android version when it comes around and have been testing out the linux version since it dropped.
    - Apocryphon 3mo ago
      GNOME Web, technically, through WSL.
      - rav3ndust 3mo ago
        haha, that is certainly one way to achieve the goal. :)

villish 3mo ago

The best feature is being able to use Firefox extensions and thus uBlock Origin and sponsorblock on iOS. It's a little buggy but worth it for me.

Cyberdog 3mo ago
SponsorBlock has a native Safari/iOS extension that works fine.
- frizlab 3mo ago
  I use 1Blocker which works very well too.
JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
> best feature is being able to use Firefox extensions “The only browser supporting Safari, Chrome, and Firefox extensions.”
- MrAlex94 3mo ago
  It isn’t really, just marketing fluff. Foxify[1] allowed Firefox to install Chrome extensions almost a decade ago and then I ported that to Waterfox after privileged extension support was removed from Firefox 56. Currently still in Waterfox stable but figured there’s not actual much advantage to supporting Chrome extensions as Firefox ones are more featureful, so have removed it in the final version based on ESR 153 - albeit would be trivial to add support back in. [1] https://github.com/bnpoirier/foxify https://github.com/bnpoirier/foxify
hirvi74 3mo ago
Safari has UBlock Origin by the same original Raymond Hill. I've had create success with it. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id6745342698 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...
- buzer 3mo ago

salmonik 3mo ago

Where's the source code for their browser? Such move of not publishing it is almost bizarre for such a pro-privacy company.

margalabargala 3mo ago
Kagi is not a pro privacy company except inasmuch as they currently consider privacy to be profitable. They are a would-be AI company who discovered paid search was a viable way to self-fund. If you ask them what guarantees you have that they won't someday decide to sell your search history, their response will be "well, it doesn't make financial sense for us to do so. Now drop it" and ban you. Here's a blog post someone wrote about this with examples: https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
- greggoB 3mo ago
  > If you ask them what guarantees you have that they won't someday decide to sell your search history, their response will be "well, it doesn't make financial sense for us to do so. Now drop it" and ban you. Can you provide any evidence of them having done this? As a paying Kagi subscriber, I am surely interested in knowing more.
  - margalabargala 3mo ago
    If you click the link in my earlier comment, the author of that post goes into that including screenshots from the Kagi discord. It's the last thing before the postmortem. > and ban you I was wrong about the banning; I misremembered that.
    - greggoB 3mo ago
      Strange, I don't remember seeing the blog post link there - I must have just skipped over that. In general I found some parts provided interesting info (e.g. Kagi bought a t-shirt producer, Kagi started out as an AI company in 2018), both with links to Kagi's own blog articles; some I found a bit naive (the tax stuff, which can easily be the case and doesn't have to be a conspiracy); and some just politics between the author and the Kagi founder. In general a lot of it came down to how the author feels about Kagi, by my estimation at least. > I was wrong about the banning; I misremembered that. Sort of a big thing to accuse them of and then realize you just "misremembered". At a min you could edit your earlier comment to note this.

mid-kid 3mo ago

Is the source code published anywhere?

salmonik 3mo ago
They have a github organization[0] but without explicit source code for the browser. [0] https://github.com/OrionBrowser https://github.com/OrionBrowser

ares623 3mo ago

No password manager built-in yet. Although I suppose I really should migrate to Apple's native password manager nowadays.

doublebash 3mo ago
I had used the built-in password managers in browsers for years when using Android. Since I switched to iPhone, I couldn’t be happier with Apple Passwords.
- datakan 3mo ago
  It’s not bad but the lack of secure notes kills it for me. Unusable without that as far as I’m concerned.
  - themadturk 3mo ago
    That's my issue as well.
dotancohen 3mo ago
Don't marry yourself to the Apple (or any other large vendor) ecosystem. I use Keepass variants on my Linux and Android devices, it's absolutely terrific.
- ares623 3mo ago
  Yeah. Right after typing that I was reminded how much of a nightmare trying to recover access to an Apple account is. I recently had to do it for a friend and it was nerve wracking, there was a very real chance of being permanently locked out if you take the wrong step.

regecks 3mo ago

Any chance Apple Private Relay still works? That’s why I stick to Safari. Am a paying Kagi user.

TingPing 3mo ago
That’s a feature of Safari itself.

Cyberdog 3mo ago

I'm giving it a try after a couple months of daily driving with Zen, which I've become quite fond of. One potential deal-breaker is that it seems to be impossible to log into GitHub. After autofilling my credentials from the keychain, the form submits, and then I get redirected right back to the form with no error message. The same thing happens when I try logging in with my passkey. Has anyone else run into this and found a workaround? I tried turning off auto-submitting password forms in the Settings but that doesn't change anything.

teravor 3mo ago

one of their "Curated Extensions" is Tampermonkey, a non open source userscript engine. when there are multiple open ones available. like attracts like?

applfanboysbgon 3mo ago
Okay...? Do you believe you're entitled to everyone's code for free?
- helterskelter 3mo ago
  Do you believe closed-source software is entitled to people's usage and good opinion? Who wants to use a privacy-focused browser which isn't FOSS in this day and age, especially given the mature alternatives?
  - carlosjobim 3mo ago
    Billions of people.
kmfrk 3mo ago
People also generally use Violentmonkey (https://violentmonkey.github.io https://violentmonkey.github.io) instead nowadays.
roundabout-host 3mo ago
The browser itself is nonfree. I would not be surprised with it promoting more nonfree software.

TechRemarker 3mo ago

Tried switching a while back. It's like Safari but with so many little UI improvements that make it so much more enjoyable but while still feeling like something Apple would design. Alas didn't use long as lack to many things such as no native Apple Pay support (have to use iOS or scan a code etc), or 2fa email/sms auto fill, private relay support, doesn't fully support 1Password, and so on. Most all of which because of Apple limitations but still little things that I value more than the better UI. However, far more important than all of that is so many sites didn't work. With Chrome you know a site will work, with Safari you know a lot may not, but with Orion it was an enormous number of sites that continually ran into issues and unlike Safari too many to keep reporting or find work arounds. All the benefits of Safari make it worth the downside of some sites not working properly, but the benefits of Orion over Safari for the massive number that didn't work right was certainly not worth it for me. Which was all unfortunate since the Orion team is doing everything they can essentially on their end. Hopefully they have a large enough niche to stick around and offer even modest competition for the big players.

JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
> such as no native Apple Pay Apple Pay is now supported [1]. [1] https://x.com/vladquant/status/1866659950921191550 https://x.com/vladquant/status/1866659950921191550
loehnsberg 3mo ago
I am using Orion on Mac and iOS for a few years now and I cannot disagree more. If a site works on Safari but not on Orion it is mostly due to ad blockers etc. Just flick the compatibility mode and it works. I have not encountered a single case where this did not fix it. Also for a while now Apple Pay works, Apple password manager works, autofill works.
- lanamo 3mo ago
  +1 - using Orion on iOS & MacOs for a few years and i like it!

cyanydeez 3mo ago

The Linux ARM64 appears to only be for AArch. Ubuntu has a snapdragon X Elite version.

TiredOfLife 3mo ago

Skip the middleman and just use Yandex browser. It has great free video dubbing feature

MrDrMcCoy 3mo ago
In the same way that I'm uncomfortable with Opera since it went Chinese and Chrome from all its corporate spyware, I'll be skipping over the Russian stuff.
- TiredOfLife 3mo ago
  Kagi is unapologetically russian, as in russian government throug yandex, connected

spaghettifythis 3mo ago

My main gripe with this is the pretty shocking performance on old "supported" iOS devices (e.g. an iPhone SE 2). When you have too many tabs, or watch more than a couple videos it just starts freezing and will sometimes crash the phone - you get an unresponsive sideshow screen for a bit before it goes to the lock screen with fingerprint login disabled (like after a restart). I can only assume they've accidentally found a way to make webkit leak memory?

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
droserasprout 3mo ago
I find it shocking that it works fine on a totally unsupported iPhone 7 (2016). With extensions! Not the latest build (unfortunately, they bumped the minimum iOS version to 17.0 recently), and I haven't stress-tested it with many tabs, but still.

8jy89hui 3mo ago

I tried using Orion mobile for months but I just kept running into so many UI bugs that I had to switch away from it :(. I love Kagi, but Orion just feels unpolished right now

hodapp 3mo ago
Same for me. It was just so full of glitches - UI not responding, refusing to scroll, menu being inaccessible, pages somehow producing looping pop-up dialogs about not being able to render right and blocking the rest of the app...
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3mo ago
  Interesting, I get occasional glitches, mainly around placement of the text bar, but they are visual and don’t affect behavior. I’ve been living on the browser on iOS for about a year now and I enjoy it. I did eventually have to abandon the desktop one about a year ago though due to bugs. It seems like it’s better now though.
laweijfmvo 3mo ago
ditto, it’s just not stable or usable at all for me.
calmingsolitude 3mo ago
I still use it because I like how easy it is to use extensions on iOS but definitely agree that there are a lot of UI bugs. Listing the most prominent ones just in case the dev is around: - At times, the search bar text disappears and the "refresh page" icon is left aligned (instead of right aligned). - When a link has an associated app that can open it, Orion opens a modal that asks whether you'd like to open it in-app or continue on the browser. However, sometimes it immediately opens the app and shows the modal once you navigate back. - When using a custom search engine, you can no longer use the search bar to edit your query and it just shows the url.
whereistejas 3mo ago
that was my experience as well. in my case, i kept running into issues with using chrome plugins.

sodapopcan 3mo ago

I paid the one-time fee that gives you lifetime access to it over a year ago and it's been at least a year that I haven't used it (It was like $270USD or something... I can't remember). I wanted to, and still want to, like it so badly but there were just too many bugs and I have been using Firefox since. Every once in a while I come back to Orion to see what's up... Now... this is likely going to sound extremely stupid to many HNers, but the thing that makes me immediately quit is that I can't make the vertical tab bar as small as the width of the icons themselves (Orion forces extra left/right padding to accommodate the small row of buttons at the top). This is 100% a UI thing (and explicitly not a UX thing, per se) but there is just something about the ultra-thin, vertical tab strip that Firefox allows (and some other browers I might add) that... I just love it. It's so stupid, I know, but it just gets right out of my way. And as someone who always has tons of tabs open: this is exactly what my tab looked liked in my horizontal tab bar days. Anyway, that's all. Still love Kagi as a company. Zero regrets I gave them a bunch of money for a browser I don't use. I'm still hoping to make the switch one day! Oh... also that whole webkit thing that puts the URL in the centre and then it moves to the left... that shit sucks. This was one of my big problems when I tried out Zen. Just make it so I can edit the URL immediately with one click and no animation (and I'm not even anti-animation generally). Like... just do it. **in' **.

freediver 3mo ago
I appreciate that you are very particular about UI. Have you considered opening a thread on orionfeedback.org and sharing some of the thoughts/ideas? And thanks for the support, being completely user-funded is what makes developing Orion fun!
- sodapopcan 3mo ago
  I have considered it, yes, lol. I'll do so. I've reported things in the past but I'm one of those people who feels like they're being a giant pain reporting too many things, especially something like this that I view as very low priority for most people. But hey, who knows! Premature EDIT: oh, you're Vlad, lol. Thanks for the nudge! :D
- 3mo ago

technovangelist 3mo ago

I only started using it about 6 months ago so I don't know what it was like before, but today it's a solid choice. far less problematic than Chrome or Firefox or Arc or Dia or Brave or any of the other browsers I had on my system. Orion was the first browser that let me delete all the rest and haven't run into any issues in months. Some of the other comments show they hadn't used it in a long time. 1Password works perfectly as does Apple Pay.

nklmilojevic 3mo ago
which 1password extension works perfectly? I have the latest Orion browser and it is buggy like before - sometimes doesn't show up, it has like 5fps and works half of the time.

cute_boi 3mo ago

I will suggest people to use helium browser over this closed source browser. I know kagi is good company, but i don't understand why they aren't open sourcing browser.

xando 3mo ago

Happy Kagi user. I switched to Orion at some point, but due to bugs and battery drain, I had to switch back (to Safari!) As soon as those are fixed, I’m back again. I’d also pay for it, if that changes anything. Actually, I would pay for the browser, period, if it was good, respected privacy, was efficient and fast on mobile, and synced things between devices.

mediumsmart 3mo ago

Using it for years on iOS and Mac. Works great and the only zero telemetry browser. Apple Pay works and the compatibility button fixes any problem site worth loading. No complaints.

kqp 3mo ago
Not only. Others include LibreWolf, Waterfox, Zen, Tor, I’m sure others.
- mediumsmart 3mo ago
  fair enough - librewolf - same as Orion: 18.29 fingerprint uniqueness - I dont know the other browsers except Tor. I use librewolf too with privacy badger and librejs - good browser

yellowapple 3mo ago

The Linux beta feels nice. Built-in ad-blocking and nested vertical tabs satisfies the two main things keeping me on Firefox (unnerfed uBlock Origin and Tree Style Tabs, respectively). Some things feel like obvious oversights, like the lack of “Search for...” when right-clicking on selected text. Also some of the settings pages are broken (like the one with per-site settings), though I assume this is just a quirk of it being a test build. The only showstopper is the lack of publicly-available source code. Transparency is a dependency of trust. As much as I want to trust Kagi's browser (I certainly have trusted them enough to be paying them every month for their search engine + AI), web browsers are the biggest attack surface on a modern desktop, and I'd be a lot more comfortable with my daily browsing being done with a user agent that has nothing to hide. I don't even necessarily need it to be FOSS (though that'd be preferable); source-available would be enough.

matheusmoreira 3mo ago
> Built-in ad-blocking Definitely enjoying this trend. I think Brave was the first to do it, and now Kagi is doing it too in their own browser. The web without adblocking is so unusable it might as well be considered broken. Ad blockers are the new popup blockers: they should be built into the browsers themselves as first class features. Only conflicts of interest prevented that. Couldn't trust a company funded by Google to maintain an ad blocker. I'm so glad alternatives are showing up.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- c16 3mo ago
  As an ad-blocker user for years, I agree. On the flip side, how do blogs, news, and every day ad-serving websites survive without them? If it dies, it dies? Maybe this is not a discussion for here right now. But it's definitely something I've thought of. Not everyone want to pay for news.
  - JumpCrisscross 3mo ago

sedatk 3mo ago

Still waiting for the Windows version.

steadyfall04 3mo ago

i’ve been daily-driving this on my iphone for almost 9 months now & its amazing. the built-in adblocker works wonders and fwiw, i haven’t faced that many bugs compared to what i see from other users. this is despite having had 1k-1.3k tabs open for prolonged periods (1+ months) and being able to search/browse through them easily.

onion2k 3mo ago

A good webkit-based browser on Windows might mean people actually start bothering to test things in that browser family. It can be done today but it's a little bit of a pain and it lags behind Safari by some margin. Run `npx playwright wk <url>` if you have Playwright set up.

cantalopes 3mo ago

I am not supporting kagi since i found out they fund putin's war via yandex that is fully owned ditrctly by state

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
dewey 3mo ago
That's fair to make as a personal choice, but full context is also important: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integration-due-to-the-geopolitical-status-quo/19 https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
- lostlogin 3mo ago
  I really wish there was a way to support their amazing product without a cent going the way of the Russian government. I get that there is a stance being taken, and it's an attempt to be apolitical, but that's in itself a political choice.
  - Razengan 3mo ago
    I wish there was a way to use American products without a cent going to fund American wars, police militarization or global spying.
    - omnimus 3mo ago
      My thoughts exactly. And unfortunazely to be able even to access Kagi you gonna need to give US gov money in multiple places.
    - TiredOfLife 3mo ago
      Putting what russia does in same sentence as what america does, shows that you are either intentionally trolling or severely handicaped.

roundabout-host 3mo ago

I find it interesting that it uses GTK, something quite unusual for a proprietary app. In any case, I am not using it, because I don't want to use a nonfree WWW browser.

antnisp 3mo ago
Surprisingly, this is what the Webkit project uses for Linux, so that's why they chose it too.
- asadotzler 3mo ago
  Webkit started as a fork of KDE's KHTML and KJS. It makes good sense.
  - ssl-3 3mo ago
    AFAIK, KHTML used Qt, not GTK. :)
- mghackerlady 3mo ago
  That and Webkit on unix is almost entirely worked on by GNOME people

Razengan 3mo ago

Looks like we're back in the 1990s with everyone and their grandma making a browser To farm that sweet data to sell to AI trainers is it?

luciana1u 3mo ago

[flagged]

shepherdjerred 3mo ago

I want to love Orion but it’s just too buggy. I went back to Safari

mholm 3mo ago
Yeah. I also noticed a fairly significant speed increase when I started using Safari again. Unfortunate. There are just too many features that Safari supports perfectly, that Orion either doesn't support at all, or has flakey support for. Especially the Apple ecosystem ones, which I'd think Apple doesn't expose, but Chrome seems to support some of them just fine, like 2fa codes.
- freediver 3mo ago
  We'd like to hear more about that - I've been using Orion for the last 6 years and checking Safari every month, cant say Safari ever felt faster than Orion. Must be a specific use case. So if you can be conrete in providing feedback, that would indeed be valuable.

est 3mo ago

I hope it brings back ManifestV2 (or something even better). Let users switch to a cleaner Web.

freediver 3mo ago
Orion already supports it.

swiftcoder 3mo ago

Curious whether they will upstream windows support. WebKit really needs a decent rendering backend on Windows, would unlock a whole world

freediver 3mo ago
https://form.kagi.com/orion-windows-newsletter https://form.kagi.com/orion-windows-newsletter

EchooAI 3mo ago

I tried the browser, and honestly, it works very fast and is very convenient. I will give it a one week trial, and give Arc a one week break. Let's see how this develops.

haarolean 3mo ago

[dead]

rpastuszak 3mo ago

Has it gotten any better in the past 6 months on Mac (UI glitches, password management)? I really want to use it but basic things like password management kept breaking (I even tried switching between different options, like BitWarden - no luck).

radicalriddler 3mo ago
Yeah, bitwarden just not filling fields at all is still broken

cpt_sobel 3mo ago

Can anyone explain how they support all 3 browsers' extensions?

freediver 3mo ago
7 years of stubborn development.

angry_octet 3mo ago

"Zero Compromise Privacy" vs "Seamless integration with all Kagi services directly in your browser." Search and translate (and browse?) traces from authentic humans sounds valuable.

aquir 3mo ago

Very fast and good UI but the iCloud passwords integration is very poor :(

vanyaland 3mo ago

Safari has used the same WebExtensions API as Chrome and Firefox since Safari 14. So is the hard part API coverage rather than three engines?

xacky 3mo ago

It's just a webkit wrapper, not a new engine like Servo and Ladybird.

gen2brain 3mo ago
Yes, and you need an army of people to "wrap" WebKit just like that. E.g., the WebKit port on Haiku, of course, is not in good shape because it has more code than the whole of their OS. EFL once had a WebBrowser control/component, maintained by Tizen devs, but of course, it has now been removed. There is no manpower to maintain such control.
mrweasel 3mo ago
At least it's WebKit and not just a reskin of Chrome, but I don't exactly get why Kagi feel that they need to develop their own browser. Personally I prefer my search and browser to be developed be separate entities that can focus on doing one thing really well.

blacklime 3mo ago

These people seriously need to stop. Kagi, Rust, Claude. Just stop. You are not innovators.

__alexs 3mo ago

So glad I stopped wasting my subscription fee on these stupid vanity projects.

assimpleaspossi 3mo ago

Not available for BSD though one might be able to run it through the Linuxalator on FreeBSD at least.

Boxxed 3mo ago

Why does everyone use webkit instead of gecko? Is gecko hard to work with or something?

LoganDark 3mo ago
Is there a reason to make a gecko browser that's not a fork of Firefox?
- Boxxed 3mo ago
  Probably the same reason that people use webkit rather than fork chromium?
  - LoganDark 3mo ago
    What? WebKit and Blink are very different now.

arthurtully 3mo ago

iCloud Bookmarks would be an easy reason to switch. SlimBrave rn works great, but I have to do workarounds via Edge to sync bookmarks to iOS Safari.

mghackerlady 3mo ago

I really, really hope they release the source for this, if not just the code for extensions so Epiphany can finally be usable for more than basic websearch

theoneone 3mo ago

I switched from brave(ios) to Orion about a month ago and almost I didn't look back. Some ui bug and certain website bit playing along(reddit) but it's OK.

deaton 3mo ago
Unfortunately, as long as Chromium has as much market share as it does, nobody will bother to make their websites compatible with anything else.

deaton 3mo ago

A browser option that isn't a Chromium reskin and isn't Firefox... it does seem like a while since we've seen one of those. I've used Kagi a bit and I've been pretty impressed with how well they desloppify their results. I might have to give this a try.

hmokiguess 3mo ago

I have permanently switched to https://github.com/imputnet/helium https://github.com/imputnet/helium for a while now and have been quite happy with it. That said, I still think the browser market is garbage for consumers.

plutokras 3mo ago
What's the unique value proposition here? I checked it out and seems like yet another Chromium fork with some privacy added on top.
- hmokiguess 3mo ago
  It's kinda like ungoogled chromium with some defaults and opinions baked-in, the website explains better https://helium.computer/ https://helium.computer/ Totally agree with you that is yet another fork with some privacy added on top, which is why I'm still not satisfied as a consumer with the market.

espetro 3mo ago

> The only browser supporting Safari, Chrome, and Firefox extensions Honestly it's nuts you've cracked a way to support all three of Safari, Chrome and Firefox extensions. In my experience while developing browser extensions, providing support for all three is somewhat of a headache. Care to share more insights on how you did it, or even launching/supporting a browser extension framework to ship browser extensions?

freediver 3mo ago
It was a design goal since we started working on it in 2019. (because why not?) It is basically a matter of time and devotion - we invested 7 years of development into it and while still not perfect (this is an incredibly messy problem!) a lot of people enjoy running their favorite extensions, even on iOS, which is truly unique to Orion.

nunez 3mo ago

Tried Orion again two weeks ago. It's almost there for me, but the lack of history sync between devices and its battery consumption are dealbreakers for me. I love it otherwise!!!

freediver 3mo ago
Orion syncs history, natively though iCloud sync. Battery consumption should be on par or better than Safari (because Orion has native ad-clocking). If this isn't the case, it is unusual and worth digging deeper into.
- nunez 3mo ago
  Hey, Vlad! History did not sync between Orion on my MacBook and Orion on my iPhone. Bookmarks synced, however. I was running the latest version on all devices. Perhaps it's PEBKAC; I'll give it another go, as using Orion was an excellent experience otherwise.

singpolyma3 3mo ago

Another webkit skin pretending to be a browser.

tunapizza 3mo ago

I'm a heavy user of Google Drive, Docs, Sheets etc. for work. Does the suite work better with Orion now? It's the one thing that forced me off of Orion and back to Firefox. Or perhaps I need to really invest in finding a functional alternative to the Google suite. And I'm reading that Orion supports containers now, which is a feature I also love.

pickleglitch 3mo ago

"Orion Everywhere You Are!" Unless you are on on Android, I guess.

nipperkinfeet 3mo ago

Not available on Windows. DOA.

Candoa 2mo ago

[flagged]