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.
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.
> such as no native Apple Pay
Apple Pay is now supported [1].
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.
> WebKit.
> A web browser designed from the ground-up.
Both of these can't be true. Perhaps they're thinking of Ladybird?
Can't you build (and design before that) an OS from ground up around Linux?
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.
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.
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.
How dare you paint without making your own pigments!
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 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.
Is the source code published anywhere?
They have a github organization[0] but without explicit source code for the browser.
Where's the source code for their browser? Such move of not publishing it is almost bizarre for such a pro-privacy company.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
Different companies and leaders. Kagi Shareware shutdown in 2016 I think.
Any chance Apple Private Relay still works? That’s why I stick to Safari. Am a paying Kagi user.
Was the Linux version just released or something? afaik Orion on iOS and Mac is nothing new.
it's been in beta on linux since early this year
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-l...
one of their "Curated Extensions" is Tampermonkey, a non open source userscript engine. when there are multiple open ones available.
like attracts like?
People also generally use Violentmonkey (https://violentmonkey.github.io) instead nowadays.
Okay...? Do you believe you're entitled to everyone's code for free?
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?
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?
F… irefox?
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.
It’s fast but it has just enough rough edges that I always go back to Firefox.
You should try Firefox or Waterfox then!
also worth checking out Librewolf: https://www.librewolf.net/
Brave is the best balance of privacy, security, and usability. I recommend it.
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/
Why not Safari? It works great (it is my main browser).
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.
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That computer, even with only 8GB RAM, should still handle Chrome well. You may have something bad installed or something misconfigured.
Great concept but buggy so not a daily option imo
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.
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.
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Skip the middleman and just use Yandex browser. It has great free video dubbing feature
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.
The Linux ARM64 appears to only be for AArch. Ubuntu has a snapdragon X Elite version.
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.
No password manager built-in yet. Although I suppose I really should migrate to Apple's native password manager nowadays.
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.
It’s not bad but the lack of secure notes kills it for me. Unusable without that as far as I’m concerned.
That's my issue as well.
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.
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.
> best feature is being able to use Firefox extensions
“The only browser supporting Safari, Chrome, and Firefox extensions.”
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
SponsorBlock has a native Safari/iOS extension that works fine.
I use 1Blocker which works very well too.