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Comment by james_pm | Hacker News Reader

Orion for macOS is still pretty buggy and, in my experience, a bit too frustrating to use as my default browser. I want to use it and pay the $5/month even though I don't use it all the time. It's close to being good, but not quite there yet.

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Yeah, I basically give orion a try every few months, I think the idea is fantastic. But it just hasn't ever hit the level of bug-free reliability that I would need, especially with extension compatibility. (Can't say this is surprising at all - making a web browser would be a ton of work even if the web wasn't a moving target)

It does seem like their long tail of issues is going down - each time I check in, it is clearly improved. So fingers crossed it continues to get better ...

I think the biggest problem ends up being what Apple makes available to it. It does so well at feeling just like Safari, but Apple appears to not make Apple Pay, Safari keychain, and automatic sms code entry (easily) accessible to third party apps. That's what keeps making me switch back to Safari

Some bugs are pretty bad. There was one that drained my battery in 30mins. But I know it is difficult for a small team.

How long ago was that? I've been seeing consistent progress on bugginess.

This was actually just last week. I guess GitHub made that, but I could not yet reproduce it.

Yeahhhh this exact bug is why I haven’t been able to use Orion as my main browser. I usually use Safari, pretty much purely for the battery life gains.

Counteranecdata: I use Orion every day as my daily driver on my work machine, together with Bitwarden for passwords and a couple simple extensions. I can’t remember it crashing or failing to render a page, and at least on my apple silicon machine, it has been very polite with resources.

Same, in a way. I've been using it for a couple months on my MacBook Pro M2 Max, zero issues. Recently I installed it on my work laptop, M4 Max, and I get frequent crashes. No idea why it would make a difference.

The current version of Bitwarden straight up doesn't work in Orion [0]. I ran into this yesterday when setting it up for the first time. Wasn't a great first experience as it's literally the only extension that is a deal breaker to me.

I'm still giving Orion a chance for now... I just installed a slightly older version that works.

[0] https://orionfeedback.org/d/10197-bitwarden-hangs-on-load

Orion on YouTube is unusable at the moment. Click play, ad plays 1 second, disappears but then nothing else plays. Click again, another ad briefly appears and disappears. Have to resort back to Firefox with uBlock Origin just to watch YouTube

Yeah, seeing this one too. Is it an Orion or Safari thing though?

I’ve been full-timing it on iOS lately and yeah, pretty buggy. It comes with uBlock but doesn’t seem to work, and neither does bookmark/fave syncing.

I recently tried it on iPad and unfortunately it feels mostly like a slightly less intuitive Safari with some touch gestures missing, and missed opportunity to fix one of them (swiping right to go back doesn’t work while the sidebar is open). Once I got Kagi search to work in Safari there was no reason to use Orion.

It killed my battery. tried for a month.

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