Orion Browser by Kagi

I&#x27;ve been using it for a while as my main browser and it suffers from all of the usual issues that early development stage browsers have: bugs, memory leaks. The bugs are nasty as well, I&#x27;m sometimes forced to switch back to Firefox: one example is once there was a build that crashed my browser when I opened a new tab in tree view.<p>The extension support is in progress as well. UBlock Origin and BitWarden work, but YNAB Toolkit doesn&#x27;t work too well.<p>Overall if you are okay with alpha&#x2F;beta testing a browser it&#x27;s fine, but if not, stick with Firefox.

I am hopeful for its development but it’s not a daily driver for me. Too many bugs, not a large enough team to support it. When I have looked at the support forum the developer is sometimes a little hostile about bugs&#x2F;issues, enough so that I don’t care to report my own issues. This is a subjective statement your experience may differ.

As a paying Kagi user, please don&#x27;t waste my money on this when Firefox already exists.

As far as I know, Orion is the only iOS compatible browser that lets you load extensions from the Chrome store and possibly Firefox as well although I&#x27;m not sure about that.

Kagi is in the “this is fucking awesome” part of a tech company lifecycle.

I&#x27;m impressed by all the work the Kagi team is getting done. I wonder how they split their focus between the two major challenges of building a new search engine and a new browser with the same small team.

Open Source would be MUCH better, but I&#x27;m seeing you&#x27;re working on it, will wait till then I guess.

I&#x27;ve been using this as a daily driver on iOS for about a month now and it&#x27;s been great. A few random teething issues but no crashes or real bugs. Supports extensions well.

I&#x27;d love to see a browser natively and deeply integrate a 3rd party password manager like bitwarden or 1password, instead of just supporting Keychain.

At this time, this is not for me unfortunately as I use 4 different OSes (Mac&#x2F;Linux&#x2F;iOS&#x2F;Windows) but looking forward to checking it out again down the line.

I use it on an old macbook-pro-2012 (stuck on Catalina and on an old version of Safari). Thank you Kagi for providing a build with a recent version of WebKit. On the iPad I use it just for youtube, sometimes. It is still pretty rough around the edges compared to current Safari.

I&#x27;m still waiting for Windows &#x2F; Linux &#x2F; Android support.

Are there any plans for Windows and Android releases?

I&#x27;ve used it as my primary browser for months! Highly recommend it. The team behind it are quite active on their feedback forum.

For me it&#x27;s been more performant than safari esp on google based sites (google meet)

How is it actually working now? The last time I tried it I felt it was pretty buggy -- but in an ideal world I&#x27;d love to switch.

I use it as my daily driver, highly recommended.

Just waiting for passkey support before I switch!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;orionfeedback.org&#x2F;d&#x2F;3025-support-passkeys&#x2F;42" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;orionfeedback.org&#x2F;d&#x2F;3025-support-passkeys&#x2F;42</a>

Currently, I stan Firefox, but only because all other alternatives compromise my privacy and security so egregiously. Mozilla has been messing around for years and in many ways, some merely dumb while others actively diminish the benefits of Firefox over others. I don&#x27;t think a privacy conscious alternative browser is in any way a waste - it&#x27;s exciting!<p>But I&#x27;d require both fullsome Linux support and an open source approach to even consider it.

Since it supports iOS and iPadOS, does it use a fork of WebKit, or is it embedded Safari? What manifest API is it going to support going forward?

EDIT: Nevermind, I somehow totally missed the &quot;beta&quot; plastered all over the place.<p>I just gave Orion a try because of this HackerNews post --- what a buggy mess.<p>I&#x27;ve already seen three crashes using it, mostly by bookmarking things or deleting old bookmarks.<p>I&#x27;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.

This is so cool. Finally all my favorite extensions&#x2F;addons on the iPad. Feels like breaking out from jail. Thank you, developers!

I tried daily driving Orion for a couple weeks and there&#x27;s a lot of great work being done, but I had some pain points. The extension functionality on iPadOS is really jank in a way I don&#x27;t quite know how to explain. Like sometimes I come back to Orion and the extensions are signed out of or sometimes they straight up just don&#x27;t work. I&#x27;ve also had some bad one off experiences of random sites taking a long time to load or running into issues. Orion plays really well with Safari though, which is great, so I run a very strange combo of Orion on my iPhone, Safari on my iPad, and Arc on my Mac. There&#x27;s enough additions on top of Safari for me to prefer Orion over it (if it works well), but not enough for me to prefer it over Arc on my Mac. Arc&#x27;s QOL features and out the box UI design just put it way above any browser I&#x27;ve used.

Is there an argument to be made for a lighter browser such as this being more secure than Safari or Firefox on macOS?

Orion has been a godsend on iOS where it&#x27;s impossible to install uBlock Origin otherwise. Thanks Kagi team!

I would try it if they supported Linux.

Funny that it uses Hacker News as its example rendering page. We must really be target group. It&#x27;s also not a particularly hard to render page or one that tracks you.

Looks of the browser are pretty great and it has built-in most the features you would need.<p>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.<p>But since it is MacOS only, I always will need to use many browsers...

If I load reddit.com on the iOS Orion browser the page is completely unresponsive. Anyone else experience this? Not a great first impression sadly.

I&#x27;ve had great luck with this browser so far, the only thing stopping it from being a daily driver is passkey support.

This is interesting... I used to daily drive Safari but the kagi extension somehow bricked the entire Safari. I&#x27;ve tried all the tricks to clear out ~&#x2F;Library folders but it is still broken.<p>Back on Firefox now... but this could be worth a spin.

Is it ever gonna be possible to support Safari Extensions and Time reporting&#x2F;blocks via iOS?<p>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.

I am genuinely curious why there is a different build for every release of macOS?

I would love to see the Value Prop of this vs. Brave. (NOTE: I pay for a Kagi Unlimited Subscription).

Gets stuck on major websites. The extension support sounds extremely fishy: I could install uBlock Origin, but either they are violating the Apple AppStore rules, or the extensions aren&#x27;t actually working (fake API, not really implemented).

Not cross-platform? Ngmi

quite shitty browser to be honest.

yet another browser. no, thank you. even worse that it is based in blink&#x2F;chromium.<p>I would rather prefer they to lower their price than investing in this.

Developing a complex product like a browser without telemetry will be hard. Especially if they are trying to commit to objectives like using minimal battery or memory. There are many many different websites so its hard to predict what your users are using the browser for.