My next main browser: a review of Orion
morrick.me
morrick.me
As it turns out, Orion is webkit based. That would explain how there can be an iOS version in the works. That seriously reduces my interest. I've signed up, because you never know, but Orion is not an undertaking comparable to Chrome, Safari or Firefox, that will add a much needed breath of fresh air/diversity to the browser landscape.
Aside: do you keep Safe Browsing on? I always turn it off, as I'm pretty wise to phishing / download buttons etc. I don't know how much of a performance increase there is, but I'm sure I've saved quite a few seconds from not having it on.
Many extensions are not functional at the moment, owing to the incomplete extension API implementation, but the progress so far is very encouraging.
I also use Dark Reader on the iOS app which is pretty cool (haven't tried any other extensions on iOS).
This kind of decision takes courage in this day and age of detailed usage analytics. I might try it out in my own projects.
Wow, this sounds amazing!
from a reddit thread: [1]
> Overall really snappy, but almost all of my Chrome extensions didn’t work properly, except for UBlock Origin which was the headlining feature on their website.
That's not good. I guess I'll download and see if my preferred extensions work with it. Other redditors didn't have issues with their extensions (though noted it was "hella buggy").
UPDATE: It does seem snappy (not much faster than Brave, if at all), but the first two extensions I tried didn't work great. Tree Style Tabs (Firefox addon) only appears on the right side of the window, and I can't find a way to move it to the left. BeeLine Reader (Chrome extension, I am the creator) runs fine, but the settings panel shows all the tabs at once, creating a very wide mess of settings.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/r9mark/did_anyone_tr...
It’s still in beta and as such has quite a few bugs. I’ve drifted back to FF.
Although I gotta say I love Kagi search. I hope there’s a way to use the service TRULY anonymously though, because a paid service requires an auth token. If they provide a hidden service, a useful api, a cli tool, and a way to pay/use anonymously I’ll gladly pay a hefty annual/monthly subscription.
The support for standard web extensions is incomplete and even ublock origin doesn’t work properly. Hopefully they can iron out the kinks of translating the standard web apis to WebKit.
BTW, I would like to have live sessions where I can have the same tab session open on a second computer/phone, or connect to different tab sessions from different computers. I don't think anyone currently offers this.
Switching between Safari on mobile and Firefox on macOS and Windows is fine for me this way.
Firefox natively supports this.
> Edit Text on Page is very useful to me as a translator.
`document.designMode = "on"` in the console in any browser.
javascript:document.designMode='on';void 0;I could not find it in the menus.
Thanks in advance!
EDIT: Ah context-menu (typically right-click) gets you to "Take Screenshot"
One thing that is really important to me is bookmark sync. It would be really great if you could implement Firefox sync (the source is available, I'm not sure if there are license problems in using it from a third party browser. In any case, if your extension model is powerful enough, somebody could write an open source extension to do it). This is the one feature for which I could imagine buying a pro version.
Another thing that I think would be cool is a tab filter. Press a hotkey, get a list of all tabs. Then press "hacker" and it highlights all tabs with hacker(news), and ⌘-w to close them. Or you could move all tabs with "office" to a new window. Or maybe you find a clever UI to select and close all old, not recently used tabs. This would be great to clean up all the old tabs that accumulate.
> I just got a new MacBook after using Windows, and am trying to do things the "Mac" way
> Press a hotkey, get a list of all tabs.
I hate to break it to you, and am really trying to not be condescending, but despite Mac's famed usability a hotkey and then filter is too "hacker" to be "the Mac way". The Mac way is one click to get to things, even if that click generates dozens of possible things to get to. Filtering, completion, etc feel like a Linux accent on Mac (I don't know about Windows, haven't used it in two decades). You probably already know that e.g. Tridactyl offers such features in Firefox but I get trying to use a Mac browser.
If you're jumping into the Mac Way, go all the way. Maybe it is better, I don't know, but sticking to your old ideas of what a workflow should be will just make the Mac frustrating.
The ubiquity of spotlight (for example, the global CMD-space hotkey) throughout Mac OS would seem to belie that view
That said, I'm happy to be shown wrong by someone with a username "swiftcoder"! I do not pretend to be a Mac expert, just someone who got frustrated trying to do things the Mac way. I've got a list of frustrations, if you'd like to dispell some more.
It powers the search in Finder's view of the filesystem, as well as "smart folder" filesystem filters. It powers search boxes in the Open/Save dialogs across every application. Every native app can choose to integrate its internal data model into Spotlight (via Core Spotlight), and use it to either provide in-app search or plug it's own data into the system-wide spotlight search...
Unfortunately, a lot of popular cross-platform apps (VS Code et al being obvious offenders) don't choose to provide spotlight integrations, so a lot of folks have never really been exposed to the full suite of capabilities
This has been built in to Safari for quite some time now. View -> Show Tab Overview (default hotkey Cmd + Shift + \). And then you type to search.
This is great for finding a tab. The thing I was proposing would go a step further, and allow you to close all the filtered tabs or to move them to a separate window, to clean up your browser.
There is the way the Mac operates for a novice. That is entirely left clicks on icons.
There is the way the Mac operates for someone like me, who has been using them since the days of Classic. That is full of hotkeys and advanced features discovered over the years. A hotkey to invoke a filter would be entirely in the scope of this Way of the Mac. (And the filter would also probably be implemented as a “search” field somehow connected to the tab bar, for the novices to discover it.)
The Mac Way includes things like Automator (or whatever they're calling the current incarnation of their attempts to make generating simple scripts a point-and-click task). The Mac Way includes the Keyboard panel in the prefs, which lets you change the menu hotkeys of any app on your machine.
With "Mac way" I mean forcing myself to learn all the shortcuts and gestures, instead of redefining them to be like on Windows, and using built-in or native apps when available.
Nevertheless, if I look at my colleagues computers, the "Mac way" seems to include hundreds of open tabs just like the "Windows way", and I was suggesting a new tool to deal with that issue.
This sounds like a great idea, please suggest it to https://orionfeedback.org
Google analytics is ubiquitous and you're tracked to your bones especially if you're logged into your Google account and while they don't read your Gmail email content, they put you in the social graph according to any email address or URL in your email and they have better idea about your past more than you do.
I still use Google search as there aren't better alternatives but I never use Gmail nor Chrome as I have plenty of alternatives for those.
Depends on what you mean by "read". Google (and MS, and likely others) certainly parse the content. For example pulling out times for upcoming flights you've booked without you needing to click into the email.
Obviously I have no way to know if they actually do anything else internally with the result of parsing. I have to assume that they do though.
I'd take it for granted that google is sucking up every bit they can get from you.
Not that I know they're doing that, just that they definitely can get the gist of what and how you're doing with their tracking algorithms.
If so… wow.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/23/15862492/google-gmail-adv...
and they did this, even if you told them not to track you.
They’re an ad-tech company. Calculating conversion rates is part of their business.
This is not a thought experiment for me. I have actually approached the web this way for many years now. Using a single program for 100% of web use has become unthinkable.
If Vim and Emacs were released as new projects today, most of HN would roll their eyes and complain that neither is "opinionated" or "minimal" enough to rely on for serious work, and let's not even get started on the lack of built-in GPU accelerated text rendering...
The aboove is from another submission's comment thread currently on HN front page.^1 Not everything can be done satisfactorily within the browser. Other (smaller) programs are useful. In the later case, the programs are not supported by online advertising.
Surely there is a case to be made for a web browser that caters to a need for focused reading, where a quick context switch to logged-in sessions wouldn't be something you would appreciate having.
At that point, you wouldn't need much of the fancy javascript served to you, and can trivially cut down on attack surface with minor sacrifice.
In what way are Google not a trustworthy company in your view?
Expecting that they'll be looking into what I'm doing is exactly what leads me to consider them untrustworthy so I'm just curious what else you're thinking of.
Google "snowden nsa revelations" see all the companies sucking up all your data, the NSA and google and all the tech commpanies have removed everyones privacy. It's called "total information awareness".
That's only the tip of the iceberg.
If a single byte of unwanted information ever leaves Orion (and this is easily detectable with any network proxy), that would spell the end of Orion's credibility.
Edit to add: yes, I realise that Orion wouldn't be your "main" browser, with just the casual usage I envisage, but it could be interesting - and maybe, if it eventually takes off and earns a rep for privacy/security, you (and/or I) might feel sufficiently informed to make the switch. I guess I feel that the browser space lacks choice/variety atm.
If we want a faster web we need to get web devs to test on slower browsers and more realistic target devices.
(I can actually think of an alternative solution that browser vendors could do ... Browsers could just display a blank screen whenever a web site falls below 60fps. Websites would get a lot faster pretty quickly if Chrome did that.)
EDIT: Actually... This is possible. Chrome should display a blank screen when a website falls below 60fps when devtools is open. That would have no impact on users, but would push web developers to fix their slow pages. I'm genuinely tempted to find the time to make a PR...
Anyway, it would be far from the first time the web browsers have thrown their weight around to effect changes across the whole Internet...
I wish that was true. The truth is that a lot of developers don't know how to do that work, or that don't care, or (very weirdly in my opinion) are actually proud of the fact they build a huge and bloated app.
Moreover though, sometimes those large apps are actually relevant. Having a background video on a brochure site isn't automatically a bad thing - those features can and do drive sales. You might disagree with that about some feature you don't like, but chances are there's some other feature you do like that other people would happily limit because they don't need it. We should be wary of imposing limits on everything because we would lose some things that are actually good for some users. To use a lovely British idiom, let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.
Personally, I’ve been using Kagi Search (the same company’s search engine, also in beta) for about a week, and have had a great experience.
Sharing data, or using it for purposes other than improving search, sure, that’s a problem. But I think it’s reasonable to say that they gotta learn something from their users.
Yo mean, a fast, energy-efficient, user-friendly browser (that I personally have been using as my main browser for the bast 13 years).
Can't say about mobile though, I don't think I've ever used any other browser on mobile (well, except Opera almost 15 years ago)
Bonus points, if that browser is actually usable and not just a toy/academic exercise.
(it does borrow a javascript library though, so not completely from scratch)
Update: definitely a downloader. Need extra 111MB to install.
I remember that once upon a time Opera did this... can we do this with Firefox or Chrome?
Makes claims about being faster and more leightweight than Chrome or Firefox. Looks interesting, but seems to be another MacOS and iOS exclusive app, so I won't be able to use it. It's a shame that the developer chose native over cross-platform and the FAQ doesn't mention any plans to support other platforms.
As I'm sure the developers will read these comments, not it isn't. Thank you for choosing to go native. There are dozens of other non-native, cross-platform browsers. Why would we need another one?
So this is a major selling feature!
I think focusing on macOS first is a good move. macOS users are currently stuck between a lagging-behind-standards Safari and a memory-consuming Chrome (not sure how Firefox performs), and there is more of a market for paid software (which is Kagi's business model).
Author describes a lot of features with words, but would have really been great if they added some images of what they are describing for better visualization of it.
Looking at the orionfeedback.org, I'd say that their most important challenge now is deciding what not to do.
But yes I am with you, I feel that this issue is not Orion-specific. But surely this thwarts my adoption efforts ;)
If you ask me what an ideal browser in 2022 is, it would essentially be a VM hypervisor with UI made for browsing.
I would have paid for a browser that resurrected Servo or something but as much as I like Kagi from the same company, I just didn't see enough differentiator for Orion compared to say Brave.
One can say browsers created the problem by letting the web get this way, but it is very hard to turn back now that we are here. It will only get worse.
Loving it.
The amount of manipulation and propaganda is crazy these days
Slow down!