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Comment by mm263 | Hacker News Reader

I'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'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.

The extension support is in progress as well. UBlock Origin and BitWarden work, but YNAB Toolkit doesn't work too well.

Overall if you are okay with alpha/beta testing a browser it's fine, but if not, stick with Firefox.

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I use it as my daily driver every day and I have very few issues with it.

That said I'm a pretty frugal user, I get anxiety if I have more than 15 tabs open, and I shut down every night.

Some websites downright don't work with it, but then you try Safari and it's either the ad blocker or Webkit, rarely Orion itself.

I'm in the camp that likes Webkit rendering the best. I think it's the most appealing font and content rendering out there, even though it feels understaffed/underfunded. I prefer Webkit overall.

I had the same experience. Even if uBlock Origin kind of works, somehow it doesn't block the same number of ads as it does with other browsers, I wonder why. Same uBlock Origin version, same filters enabled, fewer ads blocked on Orion. I used this site for example to test: https://d3ward.github.io/toolz/adblock.html - scores 65% on orion and 99% on other browsers

I'm getting 99% on Orion with their content blockers and uBlock Origin (default lists only).

The official documentation doesn't recommend this: https://help.kagi.com/orion/browser-extensions/ublock-origin...

> For power users who want that last 10% with uBlock, we recommend disabling Orion's content blocker globally. Running both Orion blocking and uBlock may cause interference with each other.

I get 100% with orion, ublock origin and nextdns combo. It's the only browser along with Firefox where I am able to get 100%.

99% of what? of ads not served? You are mixing ads and tracking and in the end, you can be tracked because you are still unique:

With my heavily, via plug-ins, privacy focused firefox I get 99%.

With https://www.amiunique.org/fingerprint I get:

Yes! You are unique among the 2206539 fingerprints in our entire dataset.

PS: with my vanilla Chrome - I use several browsers, for banking and buying plane tickets I always recommend a vanilla one - I get 47% with many things blocked. Is this thing working correclty? I just checked my hosts file and it is vanilla too. I used to have a large hosts file but this is just inconvenient since it breaks sites. I don't understand why so many things may be blocked in my chrome browser.

PPS: I wanted to give it a try in https://browsershots.org/ Is this site defunct? Whata pity.

> in the end, you can be tracked because you are still unique

Unique isn't a bad thing really. The trick is to regularly be unique in a different way. I'd rather each tab have a unique fingerprint than simply trust that there's nothing about my browser/device that could identify me. There is an ever growing list of data points your browser makes available and a lot of time, money, and research that goes into finding fingerprinting techniques.

I agree it's good to have a locked down browser for most things and other browsers for websites that you can't get working with everything blocked. Brave is worth a try before you hand your browsing history over directly to Google with chrome or to MS with edge.

> Unique isn't a bad thing really. The trick is to regularly be unique in a different way.

This perspective is new to me, and very interesting. If it's intractable to know which parts of the finger could change, the fingerprinting becomes useless.

99% as a score of this reproducible ad blocker test. You can see the individual tests on the site. I'm not saying it's a gold standard or anything, just a tool I happen to use. And you're right, passive tracking is a b.tch :)

Orion has actually triggered two kernel panics for me in the past week. It's easy on battery life though, so I've been using it still when I'm on the go.

What is a kernel panic?

A kernel panic is, when your computer presses the panic button and stops to work.

It’s when the kernel (or drivers) run into a bug. Also known as blue screen of death on the windows side.

I never seen that on a Mac though.

Ok. Well, it does happen. Happened a lot more in the past vs now.

They are more rare one current versions of macOS. I’ve been using Mac’s for about 20 years and got them a lot a lot in the early days.

They used to happen all the time with Mac OS 9 and earlier, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen them with OSX/macOS.

I definitely had a corrupted CD-R backup that would kernel panic OS X, Windows 2000, and Linux, circa 2003.

Though, most of my OS X kernel panics were due to a GPU slowly going bad and randomly corrupting memory (both under OS X and Linux, when in a particular graphics mode).

QNX is the only OS that I've pushed hard and never seen a kernel panic. BeOS was nice in that my (userspace) ethernet driver would crash overnight most nights, and I'd wake up to a prompt saying "I'm going to restart the crashed driver? Okay?", but I could reliably kernel panic BeOS with some dodgy semaphore code in userspace.

It happens on Mac. It's when you get an infinite spinning beachball. Sometimes called beachball of death, but generally called kernel panic on Unix systems.

Most of the time with Macs it starts happening when you have hardware failure. It happens way more on Windows and Linux because of the much larger range of supported devices and drivers and the varying quality of the drivers for them. Most drivers running in Darwin as made by Apple. It's also the reason Microsoft created a certification program for device drivers for Windows.

Then userland programs triggering kernel panics are good, since they make your kernels more bugfree and secure, aren't they?

They are good when you are stress testing your setup. They are bad if you are just trying to browse the damned website

How often you find kernel bugs that make your setup actually safer while browsing, and while stress testing?

How do you know Orion is causing it? Typically this indicates a kernel bug.

Last time I had kernel panics was because I had hardware issues. I doubt Orion is causing this.

I actually think it has something to do with webkit and the fact that I use Quartz Debug to disable vsync at all times. I'll try to repro, but anecdotally speaking, my M1 MacBook Pro restarted when I was doing something in the Orion browser and spit out the typical kernel panic "Send to Apple" dialog upon reboot.

That is not kernel panic, just an app crash that was caught and handled by OS.

TIL, I actually didn't realize that. I stand corrected.

I'm not very familiar with this space, so perhaps someone could explain this to me. I was under the impression that a kernel panic indicates a problem at the kernel level, not in userland. Is it not the goal of most/all kernels to insulate themselves from userland mistakes?

Does if have a mobile version or can you sync with a mobile browser of another vendor?

If not then it's not for me at this stage

It does have a mobile version for iOS, which is notable on its own because is supports (some) Chrome and Firefox extensions on mobile. It suffers similar beta-y bugs as the desktop version though. Personally I find it worth it to have uBO on my iPhone.

Yes, there's a mobile app for iOS (on the app store), and iCloud based sync between desktop and mobile.

Using it now.

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