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Comment by shakow | Hacker News Reader

> I've never understood what niche Orion is supposed to fill

For me, as battery-efficient as Safari, but with better chrome and access to ffox extensions ecosystem.

Chromium-based browsers actually have had better battery life than Safari for 2 years (!) now[0]. And perform better. Which is a real egg on Apple's face.

The only reason to use Safari is because you're knee-deep in the Apple ecosystem, otherwise something like Chrome, Edge or Brave just makes more sense.

[0]https://birchtree.me/blog/everyone-says-chrome-devastates-ma...

> But this is not to tell every Safari user that they are irrational or wrong in any way for using Safari over Chrome (or any other browser, for that matter). Does Safari use more battery than Chrome? In these tasks it sure seems to, but it’s not by a massive amount, potentially costing you about 0.5% of your battery life every hour. Is that enough for you to switch browsers if you prefer Safari’s UI or reliability or privacy options? I suspect not.

The point is moreso that Chrome being a battery hog is a myth.

Safari is less private than Brave and does not have the breadth of extension that Chromium browsers (and Firefox) do. So again, the only reason to really choose Safari is if you're completely in the Apple ecosystem.

I suspect a lot of users don't care about Chrome's (hobbled) extensions

Safari's extensions are hobbled more than Chrome's and have been since 2018.

Yes the point is many users don't use a single extension, HN is not the average user

That's interesting, because that has not been my experience at all – for my usage, Orion empirically clearly buries Vivaldi & Firefox.

Granted, I used Vivaldi rather than Chromium, but I don't expect it to have such a noticeable difference w.r.t. Chrome.

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