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Orion Browser

kagi.com

119 pointsgtirloni98 comments

I really like Kagi, but I'm starting to get that same sense of anticipatory melancholy I used to get when I found a really good drug dealer back in the day - this product or service is fantastic, and I'm very happy to be able to give it money, but I recognize this is a short term affair and some day I'll be back to having to search for it again.

I would continue to pay Kagi $10 a month forever for exactly the product I signed up for - I have zero additional product wants or needs, zero additional ambitions for the service, zero things I'd like my money to be going to other than sustaining a high-quality service that solves a need for me. I don't need or want the AI features, I sure don't need a browser, and I'd really like all of this manic product energy to be going towards the core product so I can continue to enjoy it for the foreseeable future.

Kagi offers Orion+ for those who want to support the browser development specifically.

100% agree with every word you said

I went through the same thing with Dropbox. I loved how simple it was initially: just a folder that syncs. Then they started adding all sorts of "enterprise" and "family" features that cluttered up the simple use case it satisfied just fine for me.

I understand that businesses need to expand and innovate. But it sure is nice to have a rock-solid reliable tool that just works long-term; something that you can depend on without it suddenly morphing into a weird new thing after you've built up skills and processes around it.

One of the extremely stupid reasons kagi needs to develop a browser is because ios safari prevents setting kagi as the default search engine, so they have to do some terrible hacks to get it to kind of work.

Yeah. That’s one reason I stopped using Kagi. Its not their fault but it is what it is.

I've great news - you can use Firefox on iOS and set Kagi as the search engine!

Or better yet - Orion!

That seems wild to me, but admittedly I don't search from the address bar at all. Is setting your preferred search engine as your homepage and opening a new tab to search really such a huge burden?

Yes. I do not tend to launch new tabs. I almost always use a single tab for browsing. Only when I need to keep something around then I launch a new tab to preserve the old one.

That means the address bar is my main interaction with the browser.

I don't remember the last time I used Safari on iOS, but once I started using Kagi, I was naturally drawn to Orion and that's been the best browser experienced I ever had on mobile.

The included ad-blocker being a big factor in the great UX.

I really hate that you can't set the default search engine easily like in other browsers, or that you can at least easily submit your company to be included in the defaults.

But with the Kagi extension all my searches are always redirected to Kagi on both Safari on iOS and Safari on macOS so I don't really see this as a real blocker as a user.

I understand that this is an onboarding problem, but for a technical user that's really not something preventing me from using Kagi (Like the other comment mentions).

That and Apple anti-competitively preventing non-Safari browsers from using Safari extensions, despite all iOS browsers being essentially Safari under the hood.

Kagi and Orion both entered public beta at the same time[1]. Even if they didn't: it kind of seems unfair to indict this as an additional ambition. It's not as though browsers and search engines have an exotic relationship, and there's pertinent strategic threats that operating a browser protects against.

[1]: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-orion-public-beta

Kagi founder here. I like simplicity too, but if that is the only thing I cared about I would have never attempted to build a paid search engine.

We started working on the browser before we started working on search. There were many browsers and search engines before us, and all of them failed because you can not compete with an ecosystem company (Google) with a single product. If your customers use your search engine, but then use Gmail and Chrome, your main competitor has means (friction) with them to attempt to win them back over (and you are paid, they are free!) if you ever become more than a nuisance.

This is why it was clear to me from day one that we need to offer a hollistic replacement for big tech for consuming the web - and search, browser and email (yes, we are building that too) account for 99% of consumption of the web.

Yes, it makes our job everything but simple, but without it we will not survive long term - I am 100% sure. (and in the meantime generative AI showed up and made things even more complicated)

I still love my job and the challenges it brings, every single day. While we live as a company in a complex environment we try to remove the complexity for our customers and make high quality products. I have pretty high standards for browsers and have been using them for almost 30 years - and Orion is by far the most powerful option on the market (speed/energy/privacy/features). Inviting you to give it a try.

I think it depends on what you're trying to do, and I also think the landscape is different right now than it would have been 5 years ago.

I'd actually view the browser as a more difficult market to crack than search, because there are plenty of decent free options that have not obviously succumbed to the lure of advertising revenue yet. You're also always playing a "red queen's race" with the browser market where that friction you mention with Gmail and other google properties can be used to push people away from your browser. Similarly, for email, Fastmail and Proton are both fine answers for what to do without Google, and both cover a wide enough spread of the market that I'm not really looking for alternatives (and, relatedly, running an email service _sucks_ - if you haven't hired someone with large-scale public email service experience yet, you absolutely need to do so, because it's one of the worst problems on the internet).

The search market is different - you are, to the best of my knowledge, the only actual paid search engine out there, which means you're the only one whose interests align with mine and the only one who can pursue a product strategy of actually delivering the best available information to me.

This is part of why I'm concerned about dilution of focus - as a dedicated Kagi subscriber, the reason I'm here is because you offer good search aligned with my interests, and that's why I'm going to keep paying you money. The additional products in the pipeline weren't requirements to get or keep my business, and I suspect it's the same for many of your subscribers. I trust you to run your business - you've created a great product that I'm happy to pay for, so you've earned that - but please make sure you keep the search product top of mind and make sure that's a sustainable business.

> but please make sure you keep the search product top of mind and make sure that's a sustainable business.

Having best web search in the world has been our bread&butter from day one. This is what so many people pay us for!

Great search becomes even more important in the age of agents - model quality is converging to the same spot across frontier models and what will make great answers different from mediocre ones is the quality of search fed to them. We are currently testing v2 of our Search API with select partners and plan to make this generally available soon.

We 100% intend to continue to dominate this and we heavilly invest and innovate in search quality space. A major announcement soon.

Do many Kagi customers use Orion? Are you having trouble retaining ones who don't?

> I am 100% sure

I'm definitely less than 100% sure. (I'd take a bet at those odds.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43982643

Many customers do, and in fact Orion feedback forum [1] is more active than Kagi feedback forum [2] (we do not have any telemetry and all product input is given directly by our users).

While Kagi has "only" about 50k customers, Orion was downloaded more than a million times last year and continues to be a major distribution channel and entry point for the Kagi eco-sytem. (you are not seeing any ads for Kagi right? Our products are our "ads", that is how we grow + wonderful user community)

And while you can use Kagi in any browser, it is a really nice experience when you use Orion (and it will get only better as we build more integrations). We are also aware about cross-platform users - which is why we are also developing Orion for Linux as the next platform, with more to come.

Not sure what point you wanted to make by linking to the comment - happy to address it after clarification.

[1] https://orionfeedback.org

[2] https://kagifeedback.org

How do you plan to solve sync (bookmarks, history etc..) when going cross platform? iCloud makes things easy when it's just Mac/iOS, but that won't work for Linux.

I use Linux at home, Mac at work, and have an iPhone, and very few apps look native and work seamlessly across all 3.

Orion is native on 2/3 and will soon be native on Linux too!

I noticed the reply didn't answer about sync...

I’m personally a Kagi early adopter and Protonmail user for all other standard GSuite product replacements. I find this arrangement perfectly smooth and painless, and never once wished that the services that I get from Proton in any way interacted with the service I get from Kagi. It’s not clear to me at all that duplicating the google product spread would be the best way to extend the value to customers of Kagi search.

One use case:

I would like to be able to see my emails appear in search results when relevant. Also would like to be able to quikly search the web when writing emails. This is not rocket science but for this you need deep integration between email and search. For some reason Google didn't do this in 20 years although perfectly capable of.

This is very specific. Why would you want that? Can you give me an example?

You indicate wide extension compatibility. This is more of a thought experiment (by virtue of inbuilt adblocking), does - or do you hope/plan for - the likes of uBlock Origin work.

On macOS yes, on iOS limited by what iOS lets us do (we'll push it to the max)

Kagi and Orion user here. I love them both. Would love a Kagi mail. Thanks for building such amazing products.

Although I have to be honest - even as a very devoted and technical user, I still have no idea what or why assistant is.

Luckily it doesn’t take away from everything else you’ve built.

If Vimium would work in Orion I'd be happily paying for Orion+ and Kagi but sadly it doesn't.

I couldn't agree more. The model of trying to support 3rd party extensions but not having full compatibility puts Orion in an awkward position. I would consider creating a Vimium replacement for Orion but where would you publish it? Firefox store? Chrome web store? Seems like you'd just have to distribute it as a zip that the user would need to manually import and manually update.

Besides Vimium, I generally experience enough bugs with other extensions or the browser itself that I just wind up not using Orion, despite following development for many years now.

What they're trying to achieve with Orion is very admirable but they simply don't have enough resources to pull it off. Making a browser is hard, making a cross platform webkit browser is even harder, making a cross platform webkit based browser that supports Firefox, Chrome, and in some cases Safari extensions is yet even harder.

Agree, either Vimium or Tridactyl or some other form of proprietary Vim bindings. Nothing feels quite as bad with browsers as programming with both hands on keyboard, poppping into the browser for a quick search and having to quick on stuff

> I have zero additional product wants or needs,

> I'd really like all of this manic product energy to be going towards the core product

What would that energy do if you don't need anything???

the drug dealer analogy hits so hard. Bravo.

Proton has entered the chat... :)

They used to be just about email. Now they have VPN a calendar, password manager, cloud storage and a google docs -style docs thing.

Kagi announced in March that the Linux desktop version is under development:

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/03/kag-orion-web-browser-co...

https://bsky.app/profile/kagi.com/post/3ljqsgjmkpk2n

You can signup to get notified at https://forms.kagi.com/?q=orion_linux_news

So I hate Safari with a burning passion and Firefox on iOS isn't much better. Ideally I'd run FF everywhere, but lacking Apple Pay support and iOS anti-competitively locking out extensions to non-Safari browsers make this a non-starter.

I VERY BADLY want to make this my daily driver across all of my devices, but between weird rendering bugs (which are decreasing), janky 1Pass support (which is improving), lacking history sync and the inability to run multiple instances like I can with Firefox*, it has been difficult to make the switch.

I know that Vlad and team are working hard to quash the bugs, so I'll keep trying the betas every once in a while.

*: I know that Safari and Orion have profiles. I prefer to isolate my browsers at a process level, i.e. a separate browser process for work and personal stuff. FF can mostly achieve this with Containers, which I used with the Multi-use Containers extension to create containers based on URL, but things gets weird with intermediate URLs. Safari cannot do this. Orion theoretically can, but I don't think it does right now.

I use Orion as my daily driver on my Mac. The bugginess has largely passed.

that is my experience too. Whole days now pass without touching another browser on the machine or the phone.

Even with Chrome extensions?

Time to try it again!

I guess Safari is the only major browser left that is just a browser. Google is an ad company. Microsoft is an ad company. Mozilla is an ad company. Brave is a crypto company. And these next wave of browsers are all going to be infested with AI, I suppose. Apple sells phones.

Apple takes huge amounts of cash in exchange for making a search engine their default and they go out of their way to stop users from removing search engines or adding their own. Those apple sanctioned search engines are effectively paid ads, and apple users end up getting sold to those other ad companies with no option to use anyone else as their default.

The last good browser is Lynx

Why lynx and not w3m or links?

Are those still active? Elinks is I think. I'll have to grab the latest version of w3m

w3m hasn't been updated since 2023, and the author hasn't even had any activity on GitHub since July of that year, either, it seems - which given he's had at least 3 contributions a year since 2010 and then just suddenly dropped off the face of the earth, is pretty concerning to say the least.

There is an maintained (by me) fork at https://w3m-pager.org

SeaMonkey would be good if it weren't for modern websites being well, modern websites, and both Mozilla, with their decision to cut SeaMonkey off most of their infrastructure... and later on PaleMoon with its endless barrage of drama and pandering-but-actually-not to the 'uwu windows xp!!11!1! le fruitger aro y2k' crowd... pretty much screwing them over into irrelevance.

> Brave is a crypto company

Then it's doing an awful job because it allows the user to disable everything related to crypto in 3 clicks, to never see it again.

Do they have a browser without a crypto wallet in it?

Brave is a crypto company.

Safari wont let you easily set kagi as default search. Seems like something a major browser should allow.

The Kagi Search extension works perfectly well.

I've used it previously and echo the other sentiments here about some bugs being blockers, but overall enjoyed the experience. Ultimately though, unless they get access to the APIs to auto-fill OTP codes from messages/email, I'm unlikely to switch from Safari

This has been resolved by macOS Sequoia - now works out of box in Orion.

Nice, thanks for letting me know. I'll give Orion another shot!

Bits 0x02: switching to Orion as a browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44681616 - July 2025 (28 comments)

Kagi Is Bringing Orion Web Browser to Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43302073 - March 2025 (226 comments)

Orion Browser by Kagi: Lightweight, WebKit Based - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43203394 - Feb 2025 (3 comments)

A three month review of kagi search and the orion web browser (2024) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42652125 - Jan 2025 (160 comments)

Orion Browser by Kagi - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38441139 - Nov 2023 (188 comments)

Orion Browser 0.99.126.1 Release Notes: Orion+ Lifetime License Now Available - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38088208 - Oct 2023 (3 comments)

Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31584791 - June 2022 (201 comments)

My next main browser: a review of Orion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30610651 - March 2022 (149 comments)

Orion is a new WebKit-based browser for Mac - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28799049 - Oct 2021 (184 comments)

It's interesting that they chose HN as the picture on their homepage; it makes you wonder how much of the company is supported by HN users. Is this site big enough to support a subscription based company that frequently advertises here?

It almost feels like a really clever landing page -- if you click the link from hacker news, it shows you a tailored experience that you'd be familiar with. But looking at the link, I see no parameters that would result in that kind of landing page customization. Also it seems contrary to Kagi's spirit to do that sort of thing.

That landing page is 5? years old. Most of Kagi/Orion users in the early days came from HN (and still do). I am a passionate HN user and I took that screenshot personally.

Why is going open source more difficult than not? isn't it enough to make sure all the code is legal and dump it as is?

The community might even help cleaning it. Documentation might or could come at some point in the future.

Once it's fully open source, there are certain expectations and a lot of overhead involved in maintaining the community, governance, etc. I can understand if they delay it while they are still figuring out the initial vision and want to stay focused. There are many examples of open source maintainers burning out due to that overhead, and it seems Kagi might be stretched too thin right now.

If it's not fully open source, there are certain expectaions of fully open sourcing it. Just like they continue to ignore them, they can ignore the ones you mentioned and do not do any community/governance etc. No focus lost. Also, those many examples burning out are of unpaid individuals, not commercial companies

Open source does nat mean that you have to accept contributions. Look at SQLite.

I love Kagi and I’ve been using the Orion browser on iOS for months because it support uBlock Origin but its bugginess is emblematic of Kagi stretching its resources way too thin (and the tshirt thing…)

The iOS browser is buggy as all hell: the jump to top click around the notch stops working regularly, reflow/layout breaks throwing all the buttons and url input off screen, the entire page just go blank if it’s too long (like an HN post with 1k+ comments) necessitating a switch to Safari, and on and on. I have to restart Orion multiple times a day and switch to Safari on a regular basis. I just had to do it right now because the “Add Comment” button didn’t work!

That said, I will continue to be an ultimate subscriber because their search engine feels feature complete. Although I appreciate the small features they’re adding like the @ symbol to go along with bangs, as long as that core product doesn’t get enshittified I’m happy. The Kagi team is doing great work!

I’m surprised to hear about the bugs. I’ve been using Orion on iOS very happily for a week or so now, and haven’t encountered any issues. I’m actually close to writing a praising blog post for it!

This was also my experience when I last tried around 4 months ago. I ran into a lot of bugs and often found myself opening sites in safari instead.

I hope it's improved now.

I’ve been using Orion as my daily driver on iOS for a year. I’ve never encountered these bugs. It’s possible I’m just not sensitive to them.

Same here. I noticed the macOS build has its quirks and crashes frequently (but it's beta/RC so...). But on iOS I never faced any issues that I can remember now.

I have many of these same issues. I actually think ublock is causing some of them; removing and reinstalling fixed some of the hangs for a while, but they eventually came back. I think I also switched from Firefox to chrome version or vice versa.

The general “chrome” of the app is unfortunately a buggy mess regardless of extension config.

I still think it’s easily worth it because for some critical sites it adds so much value. I just accept I’ll have to force quit a few times a day.

Also, PSA, extensions don’t automatically update on desktop.

> Also, PSA, extensions don’t automatically update on desktop.

I see an "automatic updates" checkbox now in the extensions management window

Can anyone comment on how fast it is on macOS compared to Safari or Brave? On browserbench speedometer I'm getting 29.3 on Orion and 7.70 on Safari. I'd appreciate more comparisons.

macOS 15.6 / M4 Max

  Orion (0.99.135.0.1-beta) - 22.8
  
  Orion RC (0.99.135.0.1-rc)  - 22.6
  
  Firefox 141.0 - 30.7
  
  Chrome (138.0.7204.184) - 36.7
  
  Safari (18.6)- 41.6

Orion feels as snappy as Safari though, even as a beta. Firefox feels like the slowest here :shrug:

I love brave's native ad blocking, so the idea of _even MOAR_ ad blocking appeals to me. But what is the distinction between "1st party ads" vs 3rd party? I'm a noob in this arena, so I'd need an example.

other notes:

- Love the discussion of features instead of vibes

- Even though I don't understand the comparison table, I appreciate the attempt at quick summary.

- I'm not even a fan of Kagi, if anything I'm mildy opposed. But "a browser with less ads / more privacy" may legitimately win me over.

1st party ads - 'hosted' on the website itself

3rd party asd - 'hosted' on third party sites

Orion blocks both by default (Kagi's whole game is anti ad-tech), Brave just 3rd party ads by default.

I'm guessing that the likes of daring fireballs ads wouldn't be blocked - they originate from the server hosting the website. Google ads and such would be blocked, because they don't originate on the site.

I can see the theory. First-party ads should (but very much could not) be more privacy friendly. Tracking the user becomes difficult because you need to convince people to add your tracking coda to their website without incentives like Ad payments. So you most likely have to tune ads to what is displayed on the page, ultimately making the page and the user's attention products (which is strictly superior to the entirety of the user being the only product).

lol, at first this comment confused me because I googled Daring Fireballs, and I saw no ads (ublock origin doing a really good job here). Opening on Brave though, I do indeed see the ads. Thanks for the clarifying example.

I'm an Orion+ paid user though I still don't use it for my daily driver. there's still a long way to go, especially around password manager integrations - iCloud passwords is pretty much unusable and 1Password is extremely flaky (though 1Password is a thoroughbred shitshow these days so probably not Kagi's fault). I pay for it because I hope it succeeds and because I love Kagi search.

Posted from Orion RC.

On that detour, I’ve given up on 1Password for personal use and switched entirely to Apple’s Passwords. 1P was one of the first Mac apps I bought way back when and I’d been a huge proponent for many years. The current version’s an Electronic disaster though. It seems like I had to reconnect the browser plugin at least once a week and it just plain failed to autofill way too often. Even the Passwords plugin for Chrome is more reliable than 1P now, let alone on Safari where the integration is pretty much perfect IMO.

Sigh. I really liked 1P, but they’re walking a road I don’t want to follow.

Tried it, it suffers the same space in url bug that Mobile Firefox has, and they only are interested in bug reports from people who pay $150 for their Webkit skin.

I see a picture of what looks like ublock origin, the non lite version. Does that mean Orion will continue to support manifest V2 to allow ublock origin to exist?

Just wish there was a windows version too. I want my browser bookmarks / experience to be shared across windows, iPad and iPhone.

I was using Orion for a while, but it was so hopelessly buggy that I had to go back to Arc. Hope that changes in the future.

I've been a Kagi subscriber for over a year now because I love the product and think they do a great job working on it and improving it. That being said, I've tried using Orion on my Macbook Pro and it always seems to get full of memory leaks. Freezing at times and making it troublesome to use the developer tools. I prefer Zen browser currently and don't see myself switching until Ladybird is stable

But does it have vertical tabs?

Yes

It does, even trees!

Are there other browsers that use tree tabs

Only on MacOS and iOS...

And soon, Linux

is there any idea when they're going to have the full ~99% API support for extensions as currently a lot of extensions don't work properly?

I use it on my macbook, It's great.

Monthly orion hacker news post ahha

Installed on my iPhone. I will give it a test drive. Safari is awful.

What's wrong with Safari?

Lack of UI customization and bad extension support

And no ad block, you need additional apps for that. Ad blocking should be a basic feature in a browser in 2025. Apple talks a good game on "no tracking" but they don't block the ads, and I don't understand why not. The current ad-based revenue model of the web should be completely impossible, that would get rid of entire swathes of useless SEO sites and the harmful psychological games that Facebook and others play to keep you engaged so they can keep showing you more and more ads.

Safari is unusable on iOS: no ad blocking.

Orion bring uBlock origin, this is game changing

I switched to Orion on my iPhone about a month ago from a recommendation on HN.

I’m a happy user, no real issues encountered.

The biggest annoyance I had with Safari were sites that would autoplay videos with sound.

Orion is my way to have ublock origin on iphone/ipad.

Is there another way?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com