alt Hacker NewsOrion Browser by Kagi
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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' **.
> 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?
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
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.
I am not supporting kagi since i found out they fund putin's war via yandex that is fully owned ditrctly by state
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.
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.
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.
Where's the source code for their browser? Such move of not publishing it is almost bizarre for such a pro-privacy company.
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.
> WebKit.
> A web browser designed from the ground-up.
Both of these can't be true. Perhaps they're thinking of Ladybird?
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.
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.
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!!!
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.
It's just a webkit wrapper, not a new engine like Servo and Ladybird.
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.
"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.
Was the Linux version just released or something? afaik Orion on iOS and Mac is nothing new.
Not available for BSD though one might be able to run it through the Linuxalator on FreeBSD at least.
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
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).
"Orion Everywhere You Are!"
Unless you are on on Android, I guess.
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?
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.
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?
Why does everyone use webkit instead of gecko? Is gecko hard to work with or something?
I have permanently switched to 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.
Curious whether they will upstream windows support. WebKit really needs a decent rendering backend on Windows, would unlock a whole world
Any chance Apple Private Relay still works? That’s why I stick to Safari. Am a paying Kagi user.
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.
I hope it brings back ManifestV2 (or something even better). Let users switch to a cleaner Web.
Love Kagi the search engine, Helium is the better browser.
Very fast and good UI but the iCloud passwords integration is very poor :(
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?
Can anyone explain how they support all 3 browsers' extensions?
I want to love Orion but it’s just too buggy. I went back to Safari
one of their "Curated Extensions" is Tampermonkey, a non open source userscript engine. when there are multiple open ones available.
like attracts like?
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.
paid $270 for a lifetime browser license and then didn't use it for a year, which honestly makes it the most authentic lifetime subscription I've ever heard of
So glad I stopped wasting my subscription fee on these stupid vanity projects.
Still waiting for the Windows version.
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.
Skip the middleman and just use Yandex browser. It has great free video dubbing feature
No password manager built-in yet. Although I suppose I really should migrate to Apple's native password manager nowadays.
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?
Another webkit skin pretending to be a browser.
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.
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.