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Comment by jitl | Hacker News Reader

This is neat, and reminds me of Kagi's browser Orion, since their hero image features Kagi search.

Orion is WebKit based, so it uses less battery and feels faster to me compared to Chromium browsers, yet it largely supports Chrome extensions via a compatibility layer; like Helium uBlock Origin is included by default. It also has vertical tabs which is essential for me, and open-url routing between profiles.

However, I tried it in January 2025 and gave up on using it after a few weeks of sporadic bugs. I didn't lose data or anything but some actions in the UI didn't produce any result, or they produced a confusing unintended result. I hope they get better - I will probably give it another go in a few months, especially since Arc (my current browser) is now owned by Atlassian.

https://kagi.com/orion/

Anyways, great to see a Chromium browser improving on the privacy of ungoogled-chromium.

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I love Kagi as a search engine but the Orion UI feels too similar to Safari to really enjoy it as much.

I do enjoy vertical tabs, faster browsing, better privacy obviously. But "largely" is doing some heavy lifting in your mention of chrome extension support. I use about a dozen chrome extensions typically and about 4 of them are supported by Orion last I checked. Although of course #12 in Chrome is the Kagi search extension itself :)

The bookmarks bar seems consistently wonky though, with bookmarks showing the wrong logos (like Google Sheets showing up with the Google Docs logo, or ChatGPT showing some weirdly cropped version of itself), inability to rearrange bookmarks in a folder without opening the dedicated bookmark manager page.

If some basic usability things like this were fixed, along with adding tab groups (also big for me when I have 50 tabs open), I'd probably give it another go. Kagi search engine has largely replaced google search already for me so I'll definitely give it another go once these things are updated.

Thanks for the feedback, I definitely see some wonkiness with the bookmarks bar and forwarded them to the team to investigate.

Please add a setting to disable tab hibernation. Opening my laptop on a plane only to discover most of the tabs have been offloaded makes using Orion impossible.

Tried Orion on mac for a week or two. I also had a few bugs when using google docs and sheets. I gave up because I couldn’t work. However I keep using the iOS app. It’s quite good although I need to restart the app from time to time because of some bugs.

Upvoted because this is very relevant to my prospective usage of any alternative browser.

The biggest problem with Orion is the Firefox & Chrome extensions; Many don't work properly, but you don't see any errors, so you have no idea what parts are working and aren't.

Like using a content blocker and "hoping for the best". It might work, or not.

That's one of the reasons i stopped using Orion...

Orion was a very unstable/buggy app. I don't know how it is now. The funny thing is when I had reached out to their support with a detailed bug report, they asked me to go to GitHub issues instead (or their feedback forum; not sure whether they had moved). I asked them to pass it to the team since I had already shared it and these were easily and always reproducible; I had added proper steps as well. They said - nope. At that point, I realised what a mistake it had been trying to "contribute" to yet another closed-source software. Mail thread deleted, browsers - both iOS/mac - uninstalled. End of story.

I'm sorry you had this experience. If you still have the bug report please send it to daniel.langh at kagi.com. I'll check on your original report and see how we can improve our communication going forward.

Hey, thanks for asking.

I am afraid I do not have those anymore. There were few in the mail and almost 20 (few of those were feature suggestions tbh) in the notes app. I later deleted those as well when I was cleaning up notes and cleared trash of the app. I just checked iCloud and it doesn't have that old history. If I use Orion again - hopefully when it's open source - I shall report bugs I find directly on the feedback site or the proper bug report channel then. Cheers.

(edited:)

Iirc it was from Jan-Feb of this year or maybe a bit further back. I am sure most of those would have been fixed. I remember one - when I would see the "all tabs" view on iOS and then click "Done" to get back to the normal usage window i.e one tab in focus and nothing happened. i.e basically returning from the "all tabs" view on iOS where you used to reach with swipe up on Safari.

Another - clear history on Mac used to crash for me. These were the most annoying and 100% repro. for me.

One more → iirc there was no way to customise (or I didn't find - not sure anymore) right click context menu on Mac. I almost always used "open in new tab" and there were too many options there which I didn't want or maybe didn't want on top.

Would use it 100% if it was open source, such a solvable dealbreaker.

Zen browser is eating their lunch at the moment.

Note that Zen Browser is (yet another) Firefox fork. Might as well just use Firefox, with better settings (like Arkenfox user.js, customized how you like it). Would be better security & privacy wise.

Orion is a WebKit based browser (like Safari).

Might’ve worth giving it another shot. It’s still somewhat buggy but usually just with UI things. I haven’t had a lot of actual functionality issues in the last couple months of use on iOS or macOS.

If they open sourced it maybe they could get those pesky bugs fixed...

maybe! I hope they do.

https://orionfeedback.org/d/3882-open-source-the-browser/34

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