The extension support is in progress as well. UBlock Origin and BitWarden work, but YNAB Toolkit doesn't work too well.
Overall if you are okay with alpha/beta testing a browser it's fine, but if not, stick with Firefox.
That said I'm a pretty frugal user, I get anxiety if I have more than 15 tabs open, and I shut down every night.
Some websites downright don't work with it, but then you try Safari and it's either the ad blocker or Webkit, rarely Orion itself.
I'm in the camp that likes Webkit rendering the best. I think it's the most appealing font and content rendering out there, even though it feels understaffed/underfunded. I prefer Webkit overall.
With my heavily, via plug-ins, privacy focused firefox I get 99%.
With https://www.amiunique.org/fingerprint I get:
Yes! You are unique among the 2206539 fingerprints in our entire dataset.
PS: with my vanilla Chrome - I use several browsers, for banking and buying plane tickets I always recommend a vanilla one - I get 47% with many things blocked. Is this thing working correclty? I just checked my hosts file and it is vanilla too. I used to have a large hosts file but this is just inconvenient since it breaks sites. I don't understand why so many things may be blocked in my chrome browser.
PPS: I wanted to give it a try in https://browsershots.org/ Is this site defunct? Whata pity.
If not then it's not for me at this stage
It does sound like a feature, not a bug though...
I use Orion as my daily driver (because of the nested tree view), but Kagi Search is more important to me, and I don't want to see that go down under the weight of a bunch of distractions.
It’s a bit like going for groceries and then your merchant told you all the time "By the way, I’m selling this car prototype. It makes sense! You have to take your car anyway to comes shopping for groceries so why not buying the one from us?".
But I’m a cyclist…
I really this analogy. It feels weird especially when Google and Brave both have their own browser and ad programs, so it's in Kagi's favor to stay as far as possible from inventing their own browser.
Second part of the answer to your question is that you can not humanize the web (our stated mission) with just Search. The window to the web is the browser. It is the most important software we have on our computers and yet we are as a civilization somehow Ok with the fact that most mainstream browsers through which we inform and educate are directly or indirectly in the service of advertising companies (!).
If that is not dystopia, I am not sure what is. And that is what we are up against, even if the odds are against us.
Orion is the first browser in 20 years that you can pay for and own. Owning your browser is a thing again thanks to Orion!
It is also a great customer acqusition channel for Kagi, as we do not do advertising and many Kagi members told us this is how they found about the Search product.
Yes it is hard. Yes Orion only exists on Mac, because you have to start somewhere and we are a small team. But we will get there.
Is it just that the search engine doesn't make enough space or they are finding it isn't sticky enough, so need to add more services to justify the price? (e.g. email...)
Like with Kagi search, we wanted to build a browser that gives power back to the user and aligns all incentives. We find this incredibly important.
This is why, unlike Firefox, Orion is both zero telemetry and comes with a built-in ad and tracking blocker. And also unlike Firefox, this makes Orion both privacy respecting and privacy protecting, by default. And that is just a start of things you get when you align incentives in a browser.
It's the stuff like Firefox OS and Pocket gave the bad rep to Mozilla. I don't know what they were smoking about Pocket, but I can see their thought process in making Firefox OS. Chrome OS eventually did become a mainstream OS, it could have been Firefox OS too, if it has the right people and money.
I hate even Firefox in my phone: even if you set to remove data when I close it, it does not, and I have to do it by hand every time
Never looked back.
> Is Orion open-source?
> We’re working on it! We’ve begun with some of our components and intend to open more in the future.
Maybe this will improve with the adoption of passkeys, where browsers are actually trying to integrate with the system passkeys API (a neighbor to autofill).
[1]: https://strongboxsafe.com/updates/macos-big-sur-autofill/
All passwords are E2EE, and the sync server is open source and you can theoretically self host it.
I recently read about how Bitwarden adds Passkeys to Firefox, and was left sour there is no universal API for it. Bitwarden just overrides it as JS level, and hands it over to the browser if there are no passkeys selected/available.
I imagine Safari + keychain is coupled in a more secure and well-defined way.
So I wouldn’t hold my breath.
> 1. Orion is currently available for Apple macOS, iPadOS and iOS. We are planning support for other platforms in the future.
Zilch on timelines though, so don't know how much of a priority it is for them?
I made the switch approx 6 months ago.
Occasionally it'll do something stupid and hang completely, but I'd say maybe that happens once or twice a week, not enough to stop me using it (and I live in it most of the day).
But I'd require both fullsome Linux support and an open source approach to even consider it.
> How will manifest v2 extensions work with Orion after manifest v3 roll out in Chrome?
> Same as before! Orion has its own implementation of the entire web extensions API and different "manifests" are just numbers. We support web extensions APIs regardless of how Google decided to call them or change them. Manifest change impacts mostly Chromium clones, and Orion will support both "manifest v2" and manifest v3" extensions in the future.
--
> Will Orion for iOS also support web extensions?
> Yes, we have preliminary support for some web extensions on iOS.
> Wait, are you sure? No browser on iOS can use Chrome/Firefox extensions!
> Orion makes it possible! We ported hundreds of web extension APIs to run on top of WebKit, which also runs on iOS.
--
See also https://help.kagi.com/orion/privacy-and-security/ad-tracking...
I just gave Orion a try because of this HackerNews post --- what a buggy mess.
I've already seen three crashes using it, mostly by bookmarking things or deleting old bookmarks.
I'm very grateful that there are good players entering the space (from what I hear Kagi is amazing), but Orion just is not ready to be a daily driver.
Some extensions do not work. E.g. BitWarden autofill does not work either as Chrome or Firefox extension. Some websites get laggy. Sometimes ChatGPT page lags so much that is unusable. Also if you browse GitHub, some views will lag very much, and make it unusable. Maybe some day it will be competitive also in compatibility.
But since it is MacOS only, I always will need to use many browsers...
https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/sink-it-for-reddit/id644987363...
Back on Firefox now... but this could be worth a spin.
I can set time limit for HN if i use an app, or if I use Safari. Switching to Firefox (with the same WebKit backend) means no screen time limits apply.
To be fair, Brave seems to have genuinely tried, but, seems to be failing to reach sustainablility judging by their various pivots. They've tried to walk the line of leaning toward the user while middlemanning revenue ideas to said user. BAT and crypto, VPN, messaging sales, now search+ads. The market seems to be saying no thanks from what I can see from the outside.
Orion, in straight up exchange for cash via donation and Kagi subsidization, offers to be entirely the user's agent.
We're already in Chromelandia. We'd be near 100% if it wasn't for Safari mobile.
So which is it? They cannot get away with violating the appstore terms. It must be a shim API that marks the extension as installed to some degree.
I would rather prefer they to lower their price than investing in this.
