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 3 hours 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.
c16 1 hours 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 32 minutes ago [-]
> how do blogs, news, and every day ad-serving websites survive without them?
Same as they do now. The quality ones charge for their content. The low-quality ones survive on serving ads to the masses.
2 hours ago [-]
jorvi 2 hours ago [-]
Are browser UIs themselves vectors for serious exploits?
Orion uses WebKit and I assume they try to track as close to the release branch as possible. So if you trust WebKit, you can trust Orion.
Personally I'm more of a Brave guy though, despite having been a Kagi user since 2024 :).
What I'd really wish for is an EU browser that 'just works'. Vivaldi is nice but it often has papercuts because it has a small team behind it that have to try to support a mountain of features.
roblabla 18 minutes ago [-]
There’s a lot of ways you can hold an engine wrong. Some 3rd party browser (often by security vendors…) have been vulnerable to exploits due to not compiling it with all the hardening options, or injecting vulnerable extensions that expose an attack surface to the webpage, for instance.
laserbeam 49 minutes ago [-]
> Orion uses WebKit and _I assume_ they try to track as close to the release branch as possible. So if you trust WebKit, you can trust Orion.
The problem is you're stuck at assuming, but can't verify.
pegasus 2 hours ago [-]
> What I'd really wish for is an EU browser that 'just works'.
Have you tried Zen Browser? It's entirely open source but the core team and sponsor are European, and it's actively positioning itself as the European alternative. I've been giving it a go lately. So far, so good, and I like most of their UI/UX choices.
asadotzler 13 minutes ago [-]
When a vendor bundles their own code with Webkit, it's quite easy for that vendor's code to have it's own security vulnerabilities, yes commonly in the UI, but also to open security vulnerabilities in Webkit. There's also no telling how much they've modified Webkit itself to make the rest of their code work. You simply cannot trust it and there are many security failure modes here. If you cannot inspect it all, you are trusting the vendor and I would be very careful trusting un-tested vendors of the most complex programs ever written which hold your credit cards and all of your logins probably your bank as well. I damn well would not trust the first few versions before the white hats have had a few years poking at it.
saghm 3 hours ago [-]
I don't understand what the point of keeping a browser closed-source is. Are they trying to monetize it or something?
yellowapple 2 hours ago [-]
It seems like they're indeed trying to sell “Orion+”, but it doesn't look like it buys you much besides bragging rights, in which case an Ardour-like business model of “source code is free but we charge for pre-built binaries” seems like it'd accomplish the same thing.
colordrops 34 minutes ago [-]
I think FOSS is far better. Restrictive licenses lead to much less people inspecting and working with the code.
rpastuszak 6 minutes ago [-]
Did it get any better in the past 6 months on Mac (UI glitches, password management)o?
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).
sodapopcan 6 hours 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' **.
8jy89hui 7 hours 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
calmingsolitude 40 minutes 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.
hodapp 6 hours 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 6 hours 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.
whereistejas 36 minutes ago [-]
that was my experience as well. in my case, i kept running into issues with using chrome plugins.
laweijfmvo 6 hours ago [-]
ditto, it’s just not stable or usable at all for me.
roundabout-host 2 hours 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 23 minutes ago [-]
Surprisingly, this is what the Webkit project uses for Linux, so that's why they chose it too.
asadotzler 12 minutes ago [-]
Webkit started as a fork of KDE's KHTML and KJS. It makes good sense.
cantalopes 2 hours ago [-]
I am not supporting kagi since i found out they fund putin's war via yandex that is fully owned ditrctly by state
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.
dewey 2 hours ago [-]
I feel it’s more a failure of regulation, it’s almost impossible to become a new search engine these days without using an existing index. There’s not many choices for that, Google won’t give you the data, Bing won’t so there’s basically only Yandex left.
I’m sure if there was an open, comparable index they would happily just use that but if you want to change the landscape and slowly build up your own index you’ll have to make some pragmatic choices that might not be so black and white.
Razengan 2 hours 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 1 hours ago [-]
My thoughts exactly. And unfortunazely to be able even to access Kagi you gonna need to give US gov money in multiple places.
brikym 2 hours ago [-]
That's a valid reason to use them and very pragmatic of Kagi. Sometimes jurisdiction A wants to hide something but it's on jurisdiction B's search results. If I were a Kagi subscriber I wouldn't want my search degraded because of a vocal minority.
21 minutes ago [-]
jorvi 2 hours ago [-]
Yandex divested their Russian side of the business and are Dutch.
JumpCrisscross 30 minutes ago [-]
> Yandex divested their Russian side of the business and are Dutch
Source for Kagi switching to Nebius Group [1] from Yandex?
(I care deeply about the war in Ukraine. But I'm still a happy Kagi user. I would like the option to exclude Yandex from my results. It reduces the effectiveness of the search engine. But that's a choice I'd prefer to be able to make myself. I'm not sure if that's realistic to offer to every user at scale, however.)
Do we have a timeline for when proper firefox will be available on iOS?
I’m in Japan and my App Store is set to Japan, but if I try to install ublock origin
“Add-ons are not compatible with Firefox for iOS. Try installing them on Firefox for desktop.“
giamma 39 minutes ago [-]
As a Firefox user, I make extensive usage of the location bar and the fact that Firefox allows you to search in history, bookmarks etc. etc.
It's so convenient to me, that I rarely use bookmarks. I keep a large history, and Firefox will efficiently allow me to find web sites I previously visited because it will effectively search in my browsing history when I type one or more words in the location bar, looking not only into the URL but also into the title.
This is something that I always miss when I try a different browsers. Also, while Mozilla Foundation has many issues, Firefox is opensource. I am looking forward into Ladybird but it will take time before it's usable. Until then, Firefox remains my favorite browser.
JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago [-]
> best feature is being able to use Firefox extensions
“The only browser supporting Safari, Chrome, and Firefox extensions.”
MrAlex94 11 hours 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.
That's uBlock Origin Lite, not uBlock Origin. They are two very different extensions. Lite, for example, does not allow you to add custom filters.
Cyberdog 11 hours ago [-]
SponsorBlock has a native Safari/iOS extension that works fine.
frizlab 11 hours ago [-]
I use 1Blocker which works very well too.
technovangelist 6 hours 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.
swiftcoder 41 minutes ago [-]
Curious whether they will upstream windows support. WebKit really needs a decent rendering backend on Windows, would unlock a whole world
est 52 minutes ago [-]
I hope it brings back ManifestV2 (or something even better). Let users switch to a cleaner Web.
onion2k 4 hours 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.
EchooAI 41 minutes 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.
mediumsmart 5 hours 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.
TechRemarker 11 hours 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.
loehnsberg 8 hours 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 5 hours ago [-]
+1 - using Orion on iOS & MacOs for a few years and i like it!
Where's the source code for their browser?
Such move of not publishing it is almost bizarre for such a pro-privacy company.
margalabargala 11 hours 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.
> 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 8 hours 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.
ethanhawksley 10 hours ago [-]
They can give me as good a guarantee as any search engine can that they pinkie promise they aren't selling your data.
What keeps me with kagi is the quality. It is night and day using it and using other search engines. Even if they sold my searches, I'd still use them in a heartbeat.
margalabargala 8 hours ago [-]
That's fair. Personally I don't find their searches to be sufficiently better than DDG that I will open my wallet.
I did have a former job that would pay for Kagi for employees and I used Kagi for well over a year via that. When I left the job I went back to DDG to see if I would notice a quality drop, and I did not, so I decided not to pay for a personal account.
Cyberdog 11 hours ago [-]
Is this the same "Kagi" that used to manage shareware license purchases (primarily for Mac) 30 years ago? I assumed it was as this Kagi also seems to be Apple-centric, but that Kagi was run by a man named Key (Key Netherly or something like that), not Vlad.
datakan 11 hours ago [-]
Different companies and leaders. Kagi Shareware shutdown in 2016 I think.
fooqux 12 hours ago [-]
> WebKit.
> A web browser designed from the ground-up.
Both of these can't be true. Perhaps they're thinking of Ladybird?
12 hours ago [-]
KPGv2 12 hours 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.
mdlxxv 11 hours 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 7 hours 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 3 hours ago [-]
Chrome, Brave and Opera are as much WebKit as Safari and Kagi Orion are KHTML. I wholeheartly agree on the UX part, though.
7 hours ago [-]
mattmcal 11 hours 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.
lugoues 10 hours ago [-]
How dare you paint without making your own pigments!
10 hours ago [-]
konart 11 hours ago [-]
Can't you build (and design before that) an OS from ground up around Linux?
randallsquared 7 hours ago [-]
Well, no, to be clear! There are a lot of decisions that are made already for you when you use something else as a foundation.
shepherdjerred 1 hours ago [-]
I want to love Orion but it’s just too buggy. I went back to Safari
steadyfall04 4 hours 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.
mid-kid 11 hours ago [-]
Is the source code published anywhere?
salmonik 11 hours ago [-]
They have a github organization[0] but without explicit source code for the browser.
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
arvid-lind 12 hours ago [-]
Was the Linux version just released or something? afaik Orion on iOS and Mac is nothing new.
rav3ndust 12 hours ago [-]
it's been in beta on linux since early this year
frizlab 11 hours ago [-]
And they have announced having funded a team for Orion on windows at the end of 2025.
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 4 hours ago [-]
GNOME Web, technically, through WSL.
rav3ndust 3 hours ago [-]
haha, that is certainly one way to achieve the goal. :)
spaghettifythis 10 hours 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?
droserasprout 9 hours 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.
9 hours ago [-]
regecks 11 hours ago [-]
Any chance Apple Private Relay still works? That’s why I stick to Safari. Am a paying Kagi user.
TingPing 3 hours ago [-]
That’s a feature of Safari itself.
sebjones 13 hours 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?
throw1234567891 12 hours ago [-]
F… irefox?
apparent 5 hours 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).
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.
coffeefirst 11 hours ago [-]
It’s fast but it has just enough rough edges that I always go back to Firefox.
frizlab 11 hours ago [-]
Why not Safari? It works great (it is my main browser).
themadturk 10 hours 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 6 hours 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.
khana 11 hours ago [-]
[dead]
trvz 11 hours ago [-]
That computer, even with only 8GB RAM, should still handle Chrome well. You may have something bad installed or something misconfigured.
BLKNSLVR 5 hours 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.
Gecko4072 12 hours ago [-]
Great concept but buggy so not a daily option imo
smohare 12 hours 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 8 hours 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.
khana 11 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Cider9986 11 hours ago [-]
Brave is the best balance of privacy, security, and usability. I recommend it.
arvid-lind 11 hours 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/
teravor 11 hours ago [-]
one of their "Curated Extensions" is Tampermonkey, a non open source userscript engine. when there are multiple open ones available.
like attracts like?
roundabout-host 2 hours ago [-]
The browser itself is nonfree. I would not be surprised with it promoting more nonfree software.
Okay...? Do you believe you're entitled to everyone's code for free?
helterskelter 11 hours 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?
sedatk 5 hours ago [-]
Still waiting for the Windows version.
Razengan 2 hours 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?
cute_boi 6 hours 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 6 hours 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.
TiredOfLife 11 hours ago [-]
Skip the middleman and just use Yandex browser. It has great free video dubbing feature
MrDrMcCoy 8 hours 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.
cyanydeez 11 hours ago [-]
The Linux ARM64 appears to only be for AArch. Ubuntu has a snapdragon X Elite version.
Cyberdog 11 hours 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.
ares623 11 hours ago [-]
No password manager built-in yet. Although I suppose I really should migrate to Apple's native password manager nowadays.
doublebash 11 hours 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 10 hours 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 10 hours ago [-]
That's my issue as well.
dotancohen 11 hours 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 10 hours 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.
haarolean 28 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 08:39:57 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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.
Same as they do now. The quality ones charge for their content. The low-quality ones survive on serving ads to the masses.
Orion uses WebKit and I assume they try to track as close to the release branch as possible. So if you trust WebKit, you can trust Orion.
Personally I'm more of a Brave guy though, despite having been a Kagi user since 2024 :).
What I'd really wish for is an EU browser that 'just works'. Vivaldi is nice but it often has papercuts because it has a small team behind it that have to try to support a mountain of features.
The problem is you're stuck at assuming, but can't verify.
Have you tried Zen Browser? It's entirely open source but the core team and sponsor are European, and it's actively positioning itself as the European alternative. I've been giving it a go lately. So far, so good, and I like most of their UI/UX choices.
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).
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' **.
- 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.
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.
I’m sure if there was an open, comparable index they would happily just use that but if you want to change the landscape and slowly build up your own index you’ll have to make some pragmatic choices that might not be so black and white.
Source for Kagi switching to Nebius Group [1] from Yandex?
(I care deeply about the war in Ukraine. But I'm still a happy Kagi user. I would like the option to exclude Yandex from my results. It reduces the effectiveness of the search engine. But that's a choice I'd prefer to be able to make myself. I'm not sure if that's realistic to offer to every user at scale, however.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebius_Group
https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
While uBlock Origin can be installed in Orion on iOS just fine, it remains non-functional.
As discussed before, I find this to be false advertising by Kagi: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48476448
Next best thing for me is using Safari with uBlock Origin Lite, which actually works.
Or switch to android, an operating system that didn't need government intervention to let you install a browser engine.
[0]: https://github.com/minh-ton/reynard-browser
[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1882872
I’m in Japan and my App Store is set to Japan, but if I try to install ublock origin
“Add-ons are not compatible with Firefox for iOS. Try installing them on Firefox for desktop.“
It's so convenient to me, that I rarely use bookmarks. I keep a large history, and Firefox will efficiently allow me to find web sites I previously visited because it will effectively search in my browsing history when I type one or more words in the location bar, looking not only into the URL but also into the title.
This is something that I always miss when I try a different browsers. Also, while Mozilla Foundation has many issues, Firefox is opensource. I am looking forward into Ladybird but it will take time before it's usable. Until then, Firefox remains my favorite browser.
“The only browser supporting Safari, Chrome, and Firefox extensions.”
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://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...
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.
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.
Apple Pay is now supported [1].
[1] https://x.com/vladquant/status/1866659950921191550
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
Can you provide any evidence of them having done this? As a paying Kagi subscriber, I am surely interested in knowing more.
> and ban you
I was wrong about the banning; I misremembered that.
I did have a former job that would pay for Kagi for employees and I used Kagi for well over a year via that. When I left the job I went back to DDG to see if I would notice a quality drop, and I did not, so I decided not to pay for a personal account.
> A web browser designed from the ground-up.
Both of these can't be true. Perhaps they're thinking of Ladybird?
this is despite having had 1k-1.3k tabs open for prolonged periods (1+ months) and being able to search/browse through them easily.
[0] https://github.com/OrionBrowser
https://orionfeedback.org/d/2321-orion-for-windows-android-l...
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.
Annoying regardless, but arguably Safari is doing the right thing here.
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.
like attracts like?
Who wants to use a privacy-focused browser which isn't FOSS in this day and age, especially given the mature alternatives?
To farm that sweet data to sell to AI trainers is it?
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.