Orion is a new WebKit-based browser for Mac | Hacker News Reader

Orion is a new WebKit-based browser for Mac

browser.kagi.com

282 pointsmpweiher184 comments

If possible (a.k.a if Apple allows this) please integrate Keychain with this browser.

I am not sure if there are many people like me, but I am using Keychain and it is the reason why I default to Safari and using any other browser it takes effort that I am doing, but I really wish Keychain could be integrated in other browsers too.

LE: It seems they already support this as stated in their FAQ/"How does Orion store my passwords?"

The FAQ mentions that this is possible / done with the latest Safari.

Yes, thank you for that.

Found it here: https://browser.kagi.com/faq.html

> Orion uses native macOS Keychain integration, same as Safari.

GG, I applied to be a beta-user. Let's see!

Ditto Firefox. I'd use it a lot more. Right now, only for YouTube.

Also, I hope Orion has hooks needed for uBlock. (Preparse hook?)

For whatever reason, Safari + 1Blocker doesn't filter YouTube's ads.

I'll use fulltime which ever browser that has both keychain and blocks youtube ads.

When you open the browser website you find in the middle photo of HN on orion with uBlock as the only extension (as illustration of extensions support.

Firefox works with keychain in mac, there's specific settings you have to use. They seem to be considered enterprise features so they'r ehidden in the about:config settings.

Thanks. I am fail. After a bit of foraging and poking around, I couldn't figure this out. My best guess is there was an extension, now obsolete.

> I hope Orion has hooks needed for uBlock.

It does[1].

> For whatever reason, Safari + 1Blocker doesn't filter YouTube's ads.

It does, as part of a recent addition[2]. It’s a bespoke solution because it can’t be done with the content blocking tools Safari provides.

[1]: https://browser.kagi.com/faq.html#ublock

[2]: https://backstage.1blocker.com/how-to-block-youtube-ads-in-s...

I moved from Safari to Firefox because if you're not using iCloud Keychain, the passwords Safari saves are not backed up properly with Time Machine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24626562

So I hope that, unlike Safari, Orion uses the Login rather than the Local Items keychain.

I am not sure your threat model, but Apple has no keys to decrypt iCloud Keychain entries.

If Apple wants to tell everyone that they have to use iCloud Keychain for their Time Machine backups to work, they can do that, but Time Machine backups shouldn't silently not work, only to be discovered when you've lost your data.

It's a good idea to move to a cross-platform password manager, so that your passwords don't result in OS vendor lock-in.

I still run macOS on desktop but use a patched bitwarden_rs to store my passwords. I can also use it from Android and Linux.

Yeah horses for courses I guess. I always try to use the cross-platform solution whenever I can but not everyone seems to care about that and are seemingly fine about being locked in.

I mean, it's not really "locked-in". You can export your passwords from Keychain easily enough (as CSV, if you'd like).

I don't know if this is still true, but when I last used the native solution for saving cards and it always asked for the three digit code in the back of the card, which made it useless for convenience. I still had to look for my wallet.

1password and LastPass are smarter in that regard.

The third party solutions are much better regarding edge cases.

At least on Monterey, the macOS passwords system preference has import and export password set options built-in. The format is an unencrypted CSV file.

That's nice; the last time I had to export I had to write mouse movement macros to get my passwords out of the keychain. (10.14 maybe?)

The sales pitch for this browser is really well done. What is lacking is information about who made this, and why we should trust their claims. Seems important too me if privacy is the main selling feature.

To be fair, the about page says who made it https://browser.kagi.com/faq.html#about

The about section says:

> Orion is created by [Vladimir Prelovac][0], a tech entrepreneur with a track record of executing ambitious ideas that go beyond conventional wisdom. Orion was created in 2019, is bootstrapped by the founder and is being built by a world-wide passionate team.

> We are also building a privacy-respecting alternative to Google search, currently in private beta.

> If you'd like to know more or get involved, please feel welcome to reach out to vprelovac@kagi.com.

[0]: https://vladimir.prelovac.com/

I have nothing against that guy, but it'd be nice to have more than a promotional self-description. Does he have a good individual reputation (e.g like Raymond Hill)?

I’ve never heard of Raymond Hill, so I think it wouldn’t make much of a difference

Raymond Hill created the uBlock ad blocker, and now maintains uBlock Origin (https://github.com/gorhill)

Why is Raymond Hill not working on uBlock anymore? Why is there uBlock and uBlock Origin?

He stopped working on it and gave it away to someone else, who promptly used it to raise "donations". This led him to decide to fork back the project under the name "uBlock Origin".

Here's a short summary of what went down with links for more info: https://www.reddit.com/r/ublock/comments/32mos6/ublock_vs_ub...

Why's donations in quotes?

It's contentious. The new owner posted seemingly highly inflated estimates of costs for the project. Another issue is the new owner also removed any reference to the original developer, including in the project's Wikipedia page.

> it'd be nice to have more than a promotional self-description

Literally linked in the description provided to you: https://vladimir.prelovac.com

This is being spoonfed information.

> Does he have a good individual reputation (e.g like Raymond Hill)?

Better.

"Kagi - Better Web for our Children"

Well... It's a pass from me. Anything claiming something is "think of the children" is at best facetious.

> "Kagi - Better Web for our Children"

> Well... It's a pass from me. Anything claiming something is "think of the children" is at best facetious.

That's taking it too far. It's really good to "think of the children," it's just that we have to be mindful of when that's used as a smokescreen to distract from a particular policy's highly objectionable consequences. That kind of expression also has multiple senses (e.g. "children are vulnerable and must be protected" and "we should build a better future for our children to enjoy"). The people behind this browser may not have English as a first language, so they may not be able to precisely tailor their language to English very online sensibilities.

Thanks, yes, that was the intent - and I realize it did not turn out to sound in the best way.

I thought we'll have time to figure it out before we launch but it did end up getting featured on HN unexpectedly.

The core of the idea is a 'more humane web' and we will be adjusting the messaging accordingly in the future.

I like "more humane web". Humane part of the web has really disappeared in the past decade or so.

I was also thrown off by this line, but I interpret it as intending to improve the internet not through censorship, but promoting freedom (a long way into the future).

It seems a lot closer to “Wu-Tang is for the children!” The project is very pro-privacy.

I don't see any mention of developer tools, but in case anyone working on this is here, that's something that would probably be interesting to the HN crowd. Since the home page has a screenshot of HN, I'm guessing devs are the target market.

In my experience most browsers based on these major engines, like Vivaldi, Edge or whatever have broken dev tools.

You'd be better using Safari for that imo.

Edge's devtools seem to work very well to me -- what have you run into?

Some weird stuff, most issues are placed in the responsive mode.

They fixed some already, like the resolution selector not being working properly and etc. One that still annoys the heck out of me is the fact that when you right mouse click to re-open the inspect tool the window just selects whatever option it's above your mouse pointer (usually the print option...). One workaround is just keep the mouse pressed and select the option you want.

Brave is literally the only chromium brased browser (besides Chrome itself), on which dev tools work flawlessy.

Brave working perfectly fine here. Do you work for Apple? :D I've never heard anyone defend Safari's dev tools over Chrom(e/ium)'s before.

Brave works pretty fine to be fair. No I'm not saying they're better than Chrome's, I just run into a lot of issues with chromium-based browsers.

It has ‘em (as seen in Safari). You can put the inspector button in your header bar through the customization menu and I think they’re pretty good.

One thing to note is that even with caching disabled in the dev tools it caches aggressively, which is why I don’t usually use it for development. But that’s why it’s a beta :-)

As a WebKit web browser, Orion ships with the same Web Inspector. You can disable resource caching from the "Network" tab, by clicking on the cylinder-looking icon in the right (it'll tell you that it disables caching if you hover over it.)

I’ve been using it for a few months and i’d day it’s almost ready for public consumption.

It’s essentially a better Safari, but (and this is what makes it the ONLY alternative to Firefox) with tree style tabs.

Progress has been rapid and the interaction with the dev(s) has been great. I see a bright future ahead for this browser.

Have you tried the iOS app as well? Interested to hear your experience with it.

I have (semi-daily) and would say it’s somewhat close to being day to day usable. They recently added Safari-style back and forth gestures and you can choose to arrange your tabs vertically (though not in a tree).

The main thing preventing daily driving is that it’s not in the App Store yet, leading to it not being selectable as a default browser. I also experience occasional crashes with hundreds of tabs open.

A bit of a tangent, but not that much:

I loathe the new Safari “tabs”, with as much scare as you can get in those scare quotes. But, I still can’t leave Safari be, as I appreciate the history and Keychain sync with my iOS devices.

It’s that tight macOS/iOS integration that makes me stay on Safari, along with the relatively lighter energy usage versus Chrome. This looks nice in terms of using native UIKit elements (probably, it’s just screenshots) and probably the system WebKit, but I would really miss password syncing.

(Yes, I know, there are innumerable password sync options, but Keychain sync really does “just work” between iOS and Mac.)

Here you go, someone 'fixed' the tab highlighting for you, and for only $2!

https://apps.apple.com/app/activetab/id1588852241?mt=12

(via John Gruber: "I don't know whether to laugh or cry")

The new Safari tabs are so bad that I’m sure they can’t stay that way for long. I was hoping I would get used to the broken active tab highlighting, but after a few days I’m still clicking the wrong tabs in the tab bar. I can’t believe it.

The compact layout may not be for everyone, but it plus turning on show full url in address bar, makes it obvious which tab is active.

With the tradeoff of not showing you the title of the active tab, if I'm remembering correctly?

I tried it for a bit before that annoyed me into switching to the taller layout, which is a visual downgrade from the previous design but at least has the same information visible.

You can disable them. I for one love the concept and hope they just refine it a little.

I hated them at first, forced myself to live with them and now I love them. So much more vertical space on the screen.

I think it depends on how may tabs you have at once. If you only have a handful of tabs, then compact mode works and gives you a small amount of extra vertical room. If you have more tabs though, they quickly get squeezed too much to be useful. Then it is horizontal space that becomes a premium. I prefer having the tabs and the address bar on separate lines to give the tabs their space and to give the address bar and the other icons in that are enough room to be useful. The idea that the content should be dominant is fine but I’m also using the browser features to interact with that content and don’t want to sacrifice the browser functionality.

The styling of the tabs as buttons and the reversed highlighting of the current tab are just broken UI for no apparent benefit other than someone thought it looked cool. (It doesn’t really).

This can import your passwords from Safari 15 and then can sync with Kagi for iOS which is a bit of a help.

For me the biggest loss would be Apple Pay, and “Sign in with Apple” which is incredibly useful for signing up to services while maintaining some level of privacy.

Beta tester here, "Sign in with Apple" works in Orion

What do you use for Adblock?

I prefer FF due to ublock and better floating videos / Picture in Picture

I use 1Blocker, a very mature ad blocking tool that just added JS-based blocking rules, and StopTheMadness is a popular tool for tweaking websites e.g. forcing videos up front, stopping auto play, and showing their controls. This allows macOS native PiP on most websites that don't usually support it.

Long term Safari fan here. The new tabs have terrible UX but what's worse is stability. Whoever is "at fault" there - don't try to use jira with the latest Safari as it will crash eventually.

It’s successfully pushed me to Firefox. I love safari and how gentle it is on the battery but I’d rather have 6 hours of functional browsing than 10 hours of dealing with Safari’s nonsense.

Yep. I'm seeing weird bugs with e.g. middle-click-to-open-link-in-new-tab doing what it should—but then replacing it with the blank-tab content a quarter second after I switch to the new tab.

I'm not used to Safari being buggy. It's part of why I've stuck with it for years.

I'm actually kind of loving the tab groups—it's a little weird to me that we have that and the concept of a window, still, and the two are separate, but whatever—but the tab UI itself is really, really bad.

I haven't looked, but is there something stopping other browsers (say firefox) from integrating with keychain on the mac side other than maintainability/pride/whatever?

> Keychain sync really does “just work” between iOS and Mac

FWIW so does Lastpass, in my experience :)

Orion has Keychain sync (won't re-use your Safari keychain items obviously) and you can use Sign in with Apple

Yes, but the UI is not the worst new Safari feature: performance is severely degraded too.

On iOS, Kagi is UIKit/SwiftUI and uses the system WebKit, yes. On macOS it's AppKit and ships a mildly forked WebKit to better support web extensions.

The one thing that is lacking from Safari is extensions. If this does what I believe then it will be my main browser. Safari adblocking sucks atm.

I have been happy so far with Adguard. It's not ublock origin but it will do the job.

Safari has extensions. Apple has just made them incredibly difficult to find by burying them in the Mac App Store.

And by requiring an Apple Developer Account and associated tooling, they've made them just hard enough to develop that the long tail won't bother porting.

"Has" yes. Last time I checked the selection was horrible and most of the seemingly good ones were paid. Have things changed in the past 6-12 months?

I'm on Safari, with the occasional testing and account segregations with Chrome. The combination of AdGuard[1] (found via SetApp[2]) and NextDNS[3] works for me well on Safari.

1. https://adguard.com

2. https://setapp.com

3. https://nextdns.io

I use the AdGuard extension too, with a Raspberry Pi running AdGuard Home which in turn uses NextDNS. I highly recommend every part of this setup, it's maintenance free, extremely reliable and I can't remember the last time an ad or tracker got through it.

I use Wipr and nothing else and don't see ads in Safari

Strongly recommend ad blocking on the network level with something like a pihole, one of the best tech related things I've ever done

It's true this is nice, but it's no replacement for a browser extension, and only does anything while you're at home.

I haven't left my home in what feels like 1000 years

Unless you’re also automating a VPN connection to your home network when you leave it, which can be very helpful if you’re running something like pihole

I've had pinhole straight up break real sites. Took me a bit to figure out it was pihole and not some browser extension.

Network-level blockers are very crude and tend to cause errors that are hard to debug and fix. I get it if you have no other option and they work well enough with a very conservative blocklist, but in my experience a dedicated extension will block more ads, block them better (no blank spots in pages), break legitimate content less often and when it does be far easier to temporarily bypass.

I've tracked down the "legitimate content" a few times and these are usually trackers, just baked in so deeply they break the content too.

Sure but the point is a browser level adblockers can separate the tracker content from the legitimate content while a network level blocker can either block both or neither.

Yes, but I can't install browser ad blockers on gaming consoles, TVs, and whatever other appliances the internet of shit will produce.

Also other apps.

So many large sites have started serving ads through the hostnames that serve their applications. It feels like a losing battle to keep only blocking at the DNS level.

The adblocker Wipr has recently added something beyond the Content Blocker API with Wipr Extra. I only found it because I had forgotten to switch to AdGuard on my office Mac, and Wipr Extra showed up in an update. Lots of restrictions and caveats though about what it can and can't do. Some details at

https://giorgiocalderolla.com/wipr-faq.html#what-is-wipr-ext...

Am a beta tester, Orion has growing support for WebExtensions API. You can run uBlock Origin and Dark Reader right now, for example.

I use Wipr for Mac and it blocks all ads I've seen in Safari, including YouTube ads

Just checked the recent reviews and they all say doesn't block YT ads. Is the special setting needed?

There is more than one thing lacking from Safari. Profiles is a pretty big one as well.

Hey everyone,

I am the founder behind Orion, bootstrapping the project. Started working on it three years ago with a small team just to see if it would be possible to build something like this from scratch and we just kept going. Orion is today a daily browser for a few dozen beta-testers and it warms my heart to see that we got that far considering the competition.

Few questions about Orion answered that I see pop put in the comments:

- Orion uses native Keychain integration for passwords and will use iCloud Sync to sync between devices. We have full import from Safari, including passwords [1]

- Orion uses a slightly modified WebKit which allows us to run Chrome/Firefox extension support layer on top of it (about 70% of all extensions currently work in Orion - including uBlock Origin). We are planning to complete the support in the upcoming months.

- Orion is currently trying to get to the feature parity of the reference browser (Safari).

- Orion features developer tools from Safari with a few extra ones like the Error indicator in the address bar [2] We just started with this, expect many useful additions in the future.

- Orion is designed as a zero-telemetry browser.

- Orion iOS also features a number of useful innovations like the Data saver mode [3] and multiline URL edit [4]

- The business model for Orion is to have a Pro version for those who want to support its development.

I was the founder of ManageWP [5] which got acquired by GoDaddy in 2016. Moved from Belgrade, Serbia to SF Bay Area as part of the acquisition. Spent a couple of years there as VP of Product and then decided I want to build Orion and Kagi (privacy-respecting alternative to Google search), because one ambitious project was not enough :) Main reason for this is the concern for the future of the internet and the web my children will grow into using.

[1] https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1431290547877007363

[2] https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1445301620187693056

[3] https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1429588837391507458

[4] https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1441511763631960074

[5] https://managewp.com

Congrats for the project! Love the simple UI and extensions support.

Don't you fear being held back by WebKit, which is notoriously slow to implement new web platform features? Can you give some insights on how you chose the engine?

Thanks!

Thank you!

To answer the question, we need to go a step back and answer how did we chose the platform first. The decision to go with macOS first was made in 2018 for the simple reason that we thought macOS has a bright future as a consumer OS. This was pre-M1 so we are glad to see macOS adoption grow!

Once we settled on macOS, WebKit was a natural choice as it is the web rendering engine supported by the OS manufacturer. This would enable us to have best performance and OS integration features. The drawback was lack of any browser app frameworks so we basically had to write the browser app from scratch.

I am not that worried about WebKit's slow(er) pace of web platform feature adoption (although I'd love to see something like AVIF support etc.) partly because I know that these decisions are carefully weighted for their impact (what is the right level of hardware/browser/web separation for example). In the future, if Orion becomes success, we hope to be able to have full time contributors to help accelerate its development.

WebKit has AVIF support no? I thought it was Safari specific, because it uses OS level image rendering?

Yes correct, I meant WebKit on macOS, which is waiting for OS level support although WebKit level support already exists.

This looks like a very interesting project! Do you have plans to support anything like Firefox Containers? They're a really fantastic feature for the privacy-conscious.

Yes, on our roadmap. Trying to solve for UX and reduce complexity.

Imagine a menu:

Open in New Tab

Open in New Private Tab

Open in New Container

Open in New Window

Open in New Private Window

Open in New Container Window

+ Tab groups! Oh my...

It is a bit too much, needs to be simplified.

This is an exciting project - I’ll definitely follow it closely. Do you have any plans in particular to make it especially useful to developers? It would be amazing to have a lightweight browser that’s easy on the battery like safari but with excellent dev tools.

Noticing your name - are you a free diver? If so what are your favourite dive locations?

> "Orion features developer tools from Safari with a few extra ones... We just started with this, expect many useful additions in the future."

I noticed that part, and I suppose what I was wondering more specifically was if “many useful additions” might mean powerful tools for developers or something less ambitious.

We plan to integrate Design tools as well as Responsive modes found in some niche browsers. Orion (and Safari) actually have the ability to offer best iPhone emulation for desktop developers since they use the same rendering engine.

Hi there! Orion looks great and so far ticks all boxes for me. One thing I am wondering and that I don‘t see answered anywhere yet: Does/will it support PWAs both on iOS and MacOS?

In the same way Safari does (so it basically doesn't :) We can go into various reasons why is that the case but fundamentally we agree with that approach.

What we are planning to do though is have "Web apps" support, similar to Flotato [1], which will allow the user to achieve the same (or better) effect.

[1] https://www.flotato.com/

Interesting! Would that also work on iOS or desktop only? I am asking because I would like to be able to have a seamless code-server experience on iPad.

We will have a similar version of that for iOS.

Wow that sounds too good to be true! Will definitely support this project!

Wait, is this the same Kagi that used to provide shareware payment processing services some decades ago?

Edit: Hmm, I guess not https://www.macrumors.com/2016/08/01/kagi-shuts-down/

It is not: https://browser.kagi.com/faq.html#oldkagi

Sign me up.

The performance charts & graphs look nice. And (from Safari) I am excited to see what WebKit can do with extensions and other power features.

And, iPhone version.

Also:

1. The search engine (https://kagi.com/) is super cute (don’t have a login to try it).

2. Apparently this is what happened to the kagi.com (shareware payment) domain. Nice.

I was wondering if it was the same Kagi. Guess not.

I tried the Speedometer 2.0 on my M1 Air in both Safari and Orion yesterday and got ~200 in Safari and ~250 in Orion. I have to do more runs, but if it's accurate it's pretty insane I think.

Being able to use both chrome and firefox extensions and having an iOS and macOS app is wonderful :-)

Will those features transfer to iOS though? Last time I checked truly custom browsers are not allowed there and extensions could be easily interpreted as running downloaded third party code, which is also a common excuse for Apple to throw apps off the store.

The FAQ says their iOS version does support extensions

Definitely not perfectly yet, but initial support is there for Chrome and Firefox extensions, though I also wonder how this will work with the app store policies.

Don't get too excited. Many extensions do not work. It's as if Kagi needs to work on the code to make particular extensions work. I'm sure neither Firefox nor Chromium need to do that.

If you don't want to bother waiting to be approved for the beta, you can just download it from here: https://browser.kagi.com/downloads/Orion.dmg.

I just got added to the Orion beta last night, and have been using Kagi for a while now. Both seem remarkably polished for beta products, but still have their own quirks and rough spots. In my experience I’ve mentioned a couple things that I’d like to have, and the team was super quick to get them acknowledged and implemented. It’s going to come down to how the team chooses to monetize these for me, but I’d be more than happy to subscribe if it means I’m giving less to Google.

A comparison with Brave would be most welcome.

Pros:

* Supports both Chrome and Firefox extensions, vs. Brave supporting Chrome only.

* Not so much with the skeezy crypto emphasis.

Cons:

* Brave has a multi-year head start, and has worked all the kinks out. Sync works, etc.

* This is Apple-only. Brave works on every major device.

I won’t be leaving Brave anytime soon. But competition is a good thing, and this beta is worth keeping an eye on.

I count Brave's emphasis on crypto as a pro and necessary for our hopefully one day ad-less future.

If you block ads without allowing the ability to donate a token you are effectively stealing from site owners and causing the rise of paywalls and other restrictions on the internet.

Putting aside legitimate qualms about Brave’s ad blocking business model, “skeezy” refers to Brave themselves showing me by default multiple home screen ads for various crypto wallet and NFT brokers. Opinions vary wildly on HN, but for me that entire scene is kissing cousins with MLM.

Yeah affiliates is how they make money. You can hide all that stuff, but it's a good way to support them if you buy crypto often.

Beats being the product using Google, or having a product fall behind like Mozilla because you had to fire all of your engineers.

> Putting aside legitimate qualms about Brave’s ad blocking business model

The other alternatives to Chrome (Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, and Firefox[0]) also come with a built in ad blocker.

Is it only a problem because on top of the blocking - which others also do - they also have the ads/crypto business?

---

[0] On Firefox it's more of a "tracking blocker", but things like Adsense are blocked by it.

"If you block ads without allowing the ability to donate a token you are effectively stealing from site owners and causing the rise of paywalls and other restrictions on the internet."

Great rebuttal buddy.

Sites costs money, users need a way to pay site owners.

> you are effectively stealing from site owners

This is "you wouldn't download a car" level argument.

Maybe I could have phrased it better, but the point is site resources cost money.

If no one is viewing the site, it probably doesn't cost anything.

Once people start using the site, it starts costing resources to run it.

Currently, there's two ways to pay for those resources, ads or subscriptions.

BAT allows you to easily take tips and continue the service for free that people expect, without ads.

Saying that a purposely Apple-only product has a con that it is Apple-only is like saying a vanilla ice cream has a con that it is not chocolate.

When the ask is to compare it with Brave, noting that it is an Apple-only product is indeed a con against Orion.

No it isn’t, if you’re not using macOS your not the target audience

Hm, not exactly. I’m an enthusiastic Orion user and love how well it works on macOS, but very much don’t appreciate that I now have something locking me into it.

I've (M1/16GB MBA) got my usual 40+ tabs open and Brave is only using 536MB of memory. It's rock solid. I use G-Suite/Workplace and everything has been buttery smooth since I turned off Brave's crypto/BAT notifications. I agree that keychain is the only reason I still use Safari for some things (and perfect sync with iPhone), but I lean more on 1Password these days.

Are you sure you're not just looking at the main process?

Haha yeah. M1 w/ 16 GB here as well. I just counted and I have 59 tabs open. According to Brave's task manager the GPU process alone is at 2.4 GB followed by two Gitlab tabs grouped to 894 MB (wow, killing those) and then all the others averaging maybe 90 MB. Looking at Activity Monitor I'd eyeball the sum of the processes to be maybe 4 GB.

Brave is sketchy, this is less so.

I'd use this if you can remove all the Apple crap features:

- All the crap of AI / machine learning to prevent cross-site tracking that's useless to me in "Private Browsing" mode - just give me back control over cookies (manually and through third-party extensions), and keep Apple away from my data.

- Remove the crap "Web Advertising: Allow privacy-preserving measurement of ad effectiveness" code from webkit. Keep advertisers, and Apple's online advertising networks, away from my data.

So just as there are many Chrome clones that advertise they've removed all Google spying code from it, please offer a Webskit browser without Apple's crap baked into it. If possible also reverse the changes Apple made to Webkit that actually slightly cripples adblockers, like uBlock, from working effectively on it.

Do you understand what "Web Advertising" checkbox does? Like, I'm curious if you've actually read how it works.

And I assume you're aware that "all the crap of AI / ML" is disable-able with a checkbox right?

> And I assume you're aware that "all the crap of AI / ML" is disable-able with a checkbox right?

Yeah, just like how "opting out" of Telemetry in Firefox & Windows truly means Firefox ( https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/mozilla-does-not-... ) & Windows ( https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/o9zswt/disabling... ) honour them. Or like iPhones never send location data to Apple when you turn it off ( https://www.gsmarena.com/iphone_11_pro_devices_collect_locat... ). /s

If I am searching for a privacy first alternative to Apple Safari, it should be obvious that it is because I don't trust Apple.

For someone so enthusiastic in their dislike you sure as hell haven't looked very hard at how to turn those off :)

Actually I don't even bother using Safari at all because of crap like this. Should have been obvious that if i am looking for a privacy first alternative to Apple Safari, it is because I don't trust Apple.

If you don't trust Apple & you're running an Apple OS then surely Safari is the least of your concerns...

True. I am currently stuck with a Mac due to some proprietary apps. However, by using an older macOS, not using iCloud and with an application firewall blocking Apple softwares from the net, my personal data is relatively safe from Apple for now.

> changes Apple made to Webkit that actually slightly cripples adblockers, like uBlock, from working effectively on it

We already did that, uBlock Origin works on top of WebKit in Orion.

Also, Orion is zero-telemetry by default to address your other concern. Fire up a network proxy when using Orion and you will be welcomed with a wall of silence.

That's really good to hear! But how it works is what matters as even Chrome still technically supports uBlock Origin but Blink has been modified to ensure that ad blockers like it can't work efficiently on it anymore. According to Raymond Hill, Firefox is the browser that currently works best with uBlock Origin. Does Orion's implementation match the feature parity of how uBlock Origin works with Firefox, going even beyond content blocking? Does your modification of Webkit include all the API that uBlock Origin currently uses on Firefox?

As far as we know, Raymond Hill did not test uBlock Origin in Orion yet, and when he does I hope he will be able to share the details of support with us.

> All the crap of AI / machine learning to prevent cross-site tracking that's useless to me in "Private Browsing" mode

Private Browsing, on its own, can only limit the scope of cross-site tracking to a single Private Browsing session. It does not prevent cross-site tracking within that session. (For example, if you visit two web sites within a Private Browsing session which both use Facebook widgets, Facebook may be able to correlate your activity across those sites.)

True, and a good point. I scoff at Webkit ITP because Apple has tried to "balance" the needs of the advertising industry vs Safari users. I prefer a more aggressive solution - prevent the tracking cookies in the first place. Take the example you cited - if uBlock Origin removes the Facebook widgets, and blocks Facebook tracking on all websites I visit, I won't have any tracking cookies in the first place. That automatically prevents cross-site tracking within a particular session. It must be obvious this solution is much more effective and hence why I consider ITP inferior.

WebKit's ITP is works entirely on-device. And Orion supports uBlock (via the WebExtensions API) if you happen to trust that more than content blocking.

Webkit ITP is Apple's way of trying to "balance" the interest of advertising platforms (which it also has) vs the interests of Safari users. Thus, it still allows for some tracking. As a user that is hostile to tracking and profiling, I prefer the more aggressive solution of blocking the tracking cookies altogether in the first place, and preventing any tracking. Thus, uBlock Origin offers the ideal solution to me, as unlike ITP, it blocks all tracking cookies and even goes further by preventing the tracking codes from even executing (thus even preventing the trackers from using other methods that advertisers have started using to bypass ITP - https://resources.observepoint.com/blog/webkit-itp-analytics... ). Thus, I feel ITP is a pretty limited and inferior solution from that perspective.

(I also believe this feature was introduced to introduce another vector for data collection of browsing data of its users that don't use Safari on iCloud - while ITP does run on the machine, it gave Apple a good excuse to initially collect cookie data from all users to analyse it for ITP modeling - Apple does collect data "to improve its services". Honestly, I am just very cynical about Apple and other BigTech when it comes to my privacy and data.)

Good to know that WebExtensions API has been ported to Webkit by the Orion team. It needs to be seen how they've implemented it though - even Chrome supports WebExtensions but we all know how Blink has been modified to cripple uBlock Origin and other adblockers on it.

How well does its autofill integrate with Keychain Services? I think that might be the only compelling reason to use Safari, that and maybe iCloud tabs.

I use a separate password manager (the plug-in is perfectly compatible, by the way), but it seems on par with Safari to me.

It has writes its own items in Keychain. You can't just pop it open and re-use your Safari Keychain items but you can import them into Orion.

I have been using Orion and my interest arose because it purportedly supports Firefox and Chrome extensions. It supports some, but not most. When I post about the extension I need most, xbrowsersync, in the Orion Discord forum I am ignored. It doesn't work - nor does any other extension which syncs bookmarks. Given this lack of support I can see little advantage over Safari TBH.

I know if I was developing a browser, the solarwinds product that Russia hacked is where I'd turn for the name too :)

What benefits does this give me over Safari or Firefox? Not really an Adblock or extension user. The websites I frequent don’t have invasive ads and the one’s that do get put into reader view, even if it means losing part of the content or weird picture placement. If you have invasive ads I’m not coming back.

I guess you're not the target consumer, so none. The main selling points are privacy ("like no other") and cross-platform extensions, which don't matter to you

How does Safari not have privacy features? Or Firefox? Apple has very publicly been trying to block tracking on its platforms and has the resources that are comparable to nation states. The also publicly fought the FBI and, if the blogs are true, severely hindered FaceBooks tracking.

Kagi is bootstrapped by a somewhat unknown founder presumably in Serbia or from Serbia. Serbia has not always been a friend of the West/US and the government can compel people to do things that are not privacy friendly. I mean no offense by this statement and I have spent time in Serbia. My ears do perk up when I hear Serbia/Balkans or Eastern Europe related to privacy.

So is that actually Kagi again, or did some founder buy out the name and .com as one of the assets in the bankruptcy?

I went to the about page on Kagi.com and read. Did a quick google search but the name is common.

He lives in the US and isn't exactly 'unknown' considering his company was aquired by godaddy and he worked as their VP of product during acquisition.

I do not understand what being serbian has to do with anything.

Hi there (founder here)

Both Safari and Firefox are rock solid browsers with excellent heritage. Just being put in the same basket as them for consideration is very flattering for us to begin with.

If you care about browser speed, then Orion is faster than Safari in almost all benchmarks (and Safari was already fastest browser on Mac to begin with).

We have a section about this in our FAQ if you are interested: https://browser.kagi.com/faq.html#safari

I wonder what exactly has changed since the last time this was on Hacker News. There's a plethora of Webkit-derivatives to choose from, I don't see why I should choose the one that won't let me also install it on my other devices.

It wouldn't have changed from last time, but for some native browser chrome and platform integrations are highly appealing, particularly now that most browsers have gone all-in on brand-driven UI and try to pull you into your ecosystems.

I still can't get over the fact that Orion is the name of a sex store chain where I am from.

Closed source?

What kind of data they'll suck in order to monetize the browser?

None (it is a zero telemetry browser, which is easily verifiable). Instead there will be a paid Pro version.

https://browser.kagi.com/faq.html#business

They do address this in their FAQ:

> Is Orion open-source?

> Not yet, but we plan for it to be when we are ready to receive the benefits of open-sourcing Orion. Creating something as big and ambitious as Orion (which includes forking WebKit, porting entire WebExtensions API and writing a browser app from scratch) is challenging enough for a small team like ours. We can not afford any other overhead - and properly maintaining an open source project takes time and resources. If you want to contribute, the best way to do that is to become a beta tester.

https://browser.kagi.com/faq.html#oss

Hopefully, they'll follow through with their plans to open source the browser.

Is there any crossplatform WebKit browser?

Not any more to my knowledge. But if Orion becomes a success there might be one! (founder here)

Current situation is - WebKit works great on Linux so that is not a problem. We've built WebKit on Windows too and while it works, it's not great. We are talking few developer-years of effort there (performance is main issue).

Why does WebKit perform poorly on Windows?

I do not know, but in Windows tests it performed about 30% worse than Blink (Chromium).

AFAIK the only major contributor to it is Sony.

What is the appeal of WebKit?

Anybody else remember the original Kagi.com? It was an early payment processor for independent software developers.

I sold my first shareware license on Kagi. Probably less than ten people in total bought my screensaver, but it inspired me to switch careers to software.

RIP OG Kagi!

Huh, I lost a few hundred bucks out of the collapse, bankruptcy and dissolution of OG Kagi. Before then, that was what Airwindows used for a payment processor, for years.

Them going bust was the impetus for me moving to Patreon and fully open source. I've been talking about Kagi in the past tense for years. Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time…

Yes! I remember a bunch of shareware developers I respected used it. I chose to use eSellerate, because the fees were lower.

Oh my, I probably have both Kagi and eSellerate emails in my old archive.

I was wondering if it was related. Wonder if reusing established domains like this is beneficial for search result rankings.

https://www.macrumors.com/2016/08/01/kagi-shuts-down/

Will this support Apple's new Private Relay, which is akin to TOR-lite for grandma?

I stumble on this few days back and I felt good about it. I'm now a grandma-in-training.

«Orion is a new WebKit-based browser for Mac» -- FTFY

From the title I thought this was an official Apple project. This is just a product from a random developer.

+1... Title is misleading / clickbaity

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