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72% Positive
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#browser#orion#kagi#firefox#webkit#safari#search#more#ads#works
Discussion (260 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Some things feel like obvious oversights, like the lack of “Search for...” when right-clicking on selected text. Also some of the settings pages are broken (like the one with per-site settings), though I assume this is just a quirk of it being a test build.
The only showstopper is the lack of publicly-available source code. Transparency is a dependency of trust. As much as I want to trust Kagi's browser (I certainly have trusted them enough to be paying them every month for their search engine + AI), web browsers are the biggest attack surface on a modern desktop, and I'd be a lot more comfortable with my daily browsing being done with a user agent that has nothing to hide. I don't even necessarily need it to be FOSS (though that'd be preferable); source-available would be enough.
Definitely enjoying this trend. I think Brave was the first to do it, and now Kagi is doing it too in their own browser.
The web without adblocking is so unusable it might as well be considered broken. Ad blockers are the new popup blockers: they should be built into the browsers themselves as first class features. Only conflicts of interest prevented that. Couldn't trust a company funded by Google to maintain an ad blocker. I'm so glad alternatives are showing up.
It's cheaper for a webstore to pay one good website personally, and people trust ads like that a lot more. It's almost like a personal recomendation from the team curating knowledge base.
And no ad trackers, plus quicker website, win/win|win situation for everybody
Same as they do now. The quality ones charge for their content. The low-quality ones survive on serving ads to the masses.
People want things for free. Too bad. Nothing is really free. Either you pay for it, have ads, or have your taxes pay for it as part of public media. Personally, I'd like to see forced ads banned. Having ads that the user can come to see is fine (e.g. I'm looking for a product and I want to browse pitches, totally fine). That means that yes, we need a way where news can get paid. Most big news companies already offer paid tiers, they just continue to shove ads even then.
the bad ad ecosystem is where there's whole demand, supply side platforms and ad exchanges that mine and sell your data.
now there's better tech to do native ads without the intrusion and massive bad experience.
you're reading some article about EV's - then boom the publisher themselves can serve you a small ad - not serve you an ad about weight loss or viagra or any other shit stuff.
Maybe if adblockers become more widespread that will start to happen, right now ad networks seem to just allow anything.
Like if I'm reading a cooking article and there's an add to the side for some cooking gadgets or something like that, sure why not!
It didn’t catch on back then. But time are changing.
I heard that argument many times before, and to this I can only say: if your revenue model is based on pestering real humans, you need to go extinct. So if they die that is great. The sooner we can get rid of companies that build their existence on pester-harassing people, the better. The days of infiltrating people's minds via ads are over - these companies just have not realised that yet. I live a 100% ad-free life (ok, that's not really possible, since sometimes I still see ads, but I strive towards that ideal - the sooner companies that rely on ads go extinct, the better, and the more they complain, the more convinced I am that they must go extinct today rather than tomorrow).
Of course this creates second order effects. If no one ever views the ads on the review and recipe sites, those sites will disappear. Then what do the LLMs reference? Parametric knowledge? Google is trying to get ahead of this with "Google Zero:" an internet in which one never leaves Google because they cache and serve everything a user could ever want. All stolen from other websites, of course.
I hope we end up back at the internet of the 90s. Small, unmonitised hobby spaces. Unfortunately bots will be 99% of all internet traffic within a few years, so how do we protect these spaces from unsolicited spam, disinformation campaigns, trolling, etc? We might actually go and touch some grass and re-learn how to socialise in person. This is not a bad thing.
I actually started making an LLM-powered browser extension that I thought could read the page and determine if it passed a smell test and block it if it didn't meet some strict criteria I'd set for her, but I didn't get very far before I became too concerned about prompt injection. Wanted to do the same on her e-mail, because gmail's built in filters sometimes let her down, but same concern. Prompt injection there may be trivial as well.
Agreed. Google can not be trusted. They once tried to run the "acceptable ads" campaign. That one died down quickly after people pointed out the hypocrisy by Google. Nowadays it seems nobody likes Google anymore, so it is much easier to reject its various rubbish claims. See also how Google is waging war against ublock origin.
I'd recommend reading Byung-Chul Han. In his book The Transparency Society, he argues - quite convincingly IMHO - that transparency is asked when trust is missing.
Orion uses WebKit and I assume they try to track as close to the release branch as possible. So if you trust WebKit, you can trust Orion.
Personally I'm more of a Brave guy though, despite having been a Kagi user since 2024 :).
What I'd really wish for is an EU browser that 'just works'. Vivaldi is nice but it often has papercuts because it has a small team behind it that have to try to support a mountain of features.
The problem is you're stuck at assuming, but can't verify.
Have you tried Zen Browser? It's entirely open source but the core team and sponsor are European, and it's actively positioning itself as the European alternative. I've been giving it a go lately. So far, so good, and I like most of their UI/UX choices.
Agree with the lack of publicly-available source code.
Less agents these days
I wanted to, and still want to, like it so badly but there were just too many bugs and I have been using Firefox since. Every once in a while I come back to Orion to see what's up...
Now... this is likely going to sound extremely stupid to many HNers, but the thing that makes me immediately quit is that I can't make the vertical tab bar as small as the width of the icons themselves (Orion forces extra left/right padding to accommodate the small row of buttons at the top). This is 100% a UI thing (and explicitly not a UX thing, per se) but there is just something about the ultra-thin, vertical tab strip that Firefox allows (and some other browers I might add) that... I just love it. It's so stupid, I know, but it just gets right out of my way. And as someone who always has tons of tabs open: this is exactly what my tab looked liked in my horizontal tab bar days.
Anyway, that's all. Still love Kagi as a company. Zero regrets I gave them a bunch of money for a browser I don't use. I'm still hoping to make the switch one day!
Oh... also that whole webkit thing that puts the URL in the centre and then it moves to the left... that shit sucks. This was one of my big problems when I tried out Zen. Just make it so I can edit the URL immediately with one click and no animation (and I'm not even anti-animation generally). Like... just do it. **in' **.
And thanks for the support, being completely user-funded is what makes developing Orion fun!
Premature EDIT: oh, you're Vlad, lol. Thanks for the nudge! :D
Honestly it's nuts you've cracked a way to support all three of Safari, Chrome and Firefox extensions. In my experience while developing browser extensions, providing support for all three is somewhat of a headache.
Care to share more insights on how you did it, or even launching/supporting a browser extension framework to ship browser extensions?
- At times, the search bar text disappears and the "refresh page" icon is left aligned (instead of right aligned).
- When a link has an associated app that can open it, Orion opens a modal that asks whether you'd like to open it in-app or continue on the browser. However, sometimes it immediately opens the app and shows the modal once you navigate back.
- When using a custom search engine, you can no longer use the search bar to edit your query and it just shows the url.
I did eventually have to abandon the desktop one about a year ago though due to bugs. It seems like it’s better now though.
Sure they are sometimes some buggy UI controls (like the focus not working), but for the most part, the experience has been smooth.
Did you try to report the bugs when you had some? Maybe this could help everyone else using the browser.
Or switch to android, an operating system that didn't need government intervention to let you install a browser engine.
[0]: https://github.com/minh-ton/reynard-browser
[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1882872
The EU has been fumbling the application of the Digital Markets Act. They have been sitting on a judgement of non-compliance regarding third party stores for literally years now. By now they could have moved to forced compliance and huge fines. It's not clear if there is some kind of hidden diplomacy happening, a desire to not anger Trump, or sheer incompetence. Either way, I have lost hope that the EU bureaucratic engine will ever do anything to help ordinary people. Their only function now appears to hurt the very weakest in society, because they can't fight back.
-angry Dane
I’m in Japan and my App Store is set to Japan, but if I try to install ublock origin
“Add-ons are not compatible with Firefox for iOS. Try installing them on Firefox for desktop.“
While uBlock Origin can be installed in Orion on iOS just fine, it remains non-functional.
As discussed before, I find this to be false advertising by Kagi: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48476448
Next best thing for me is using Safari with uBlock Origin Lite, which actually works.
It's so convenient to me, that I rarely use bookmarks. I keep a large history, and Firefox will efficiently allow me to find web sites I previously visited because it will effectively search in my browsing history when I type one or more words in the location bar, looking not only into the URL but also into the title.
This is something that I always miss when I try a different browsers. Also, while Mozilla Foundation has many issues, Firefox is opensource. I am looking forward into Ladybird but it will take time before it's usable. Until then, Firefox remains my favorite browser.
“The only browser supporting Safari, Chrome, and Firefox extensions.”
Currently still in Waterfox stable but figured there’s not actual much advantage to supporting Chrome extensions as Firefox ones are more featureful, so have removed it in the final version based on ESR 153 - albeit would be trivial to add support back in.
[1] https://github.com/bnpoirier/foxify
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...
Maybe english is not his first language, but at least in America we use the word “politics” to describe things like party association, arguing over wedge issues, treating elections as a “team sport”, rhetoric, etc. We don’t use it to describe an attempt by one nation to wipe out another one.
I’ve been a Kagi user for several years now but, ugh, now I have to think about it a lot more and I’m probably not going to be as enthusiastic about recommending it.
The moral dimension is also completely illusory. Ukraine is fighting a war of attrition that's funding is due to the same cold-hearted power politics that Russia subscribes to. It greatly benefits the US and EU to keep Russia in an expensive, resource-intensive, prolonged military engagement. Put another way, the US is knowingly sacrificing Ukrainian lives and infrastructure because it gives us more power; however, at the end of the day we get to drape our actions in nice sounding rhetoric about supporting national independence even though that is merely accidental. Not to mention that the Ukrainian government has legitimately persecuted Russian-speaking minority populations in the country. Obviously, this has very little to do Russia's actual motivations for the war, but the point is the Russia's actions also have accidental good effects.
I’m sure if there was an open, comparable index they would happily just use that but if you want to change the landscape and slowly build up your own index you’ll have to make some pragmatic choices that might not be so black and white.
I wish it were not necessary to use search indexes from multiple countries I do not like, but the American government and American companies have decided they should be in charge of what users are allowed to see. I see no alternative.
And after you then stopped typing the response, otherwise having to use a device that was made in China built from oil-based components using oil—based transport throughout its supply chain, send a postcard with your apology to the Kagi team and anyone else who does not fund wars and still uses traded goods, because this is how the world is.
If you want to throw a however tiny wrench into Putin‘s war efforts, complain load to your government to join sanctions and to have them support Ukraine and make your choice at the ballot box accordingly.
why? Kagi is not entitled to be paid by them, and on free market they are free to not buy a commercial product and use alternatives
and avoiding Kagi is trivial to achieve while avoiding products that were produced with oil in some way is impossible
Source for Kagi switching to Nebius Group [1] from Yandex?
(I care deeply about the war in Ukraine. But I'm still a happy Kagi user. I would like the option to exclude Yandex from my results. It reduces the effectiveness of the search engine. But that's a choice I'd prefer to be able to make myself. I'm not sure if that's realistic to offer to every user at scale, however.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebius_Group
https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
Apple Pay is now supported [1].
[1] https://x.com/vladquant/status/1866659950921191550
If a site works on Safari but not on Orion it is mostly due to ad blockers etc. Just flick the compatibility mode and it works. I have not encountered a single case where this did not fix it.
Also for a while now Apple Pay works, Apple password manager works, autofill works.
I have the latest Orion browser and it is buggy like before - sometimes doesn't show up, it has like 5fps and works half of the time.
They are a would-be AI company who discovered paid search was a viable way to self-fund.
If you ask them what guarantees you have that they won't someday decide to sell your search history, their response will be "well, it doesn't make financial sense for us to do so. Now drop it" and ban you.
Here's a blog post someone wrote about this with examples: https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
Can you provide any evidence of them having done this? As a paying Kagi subscriber, I am surely interested in knowing more.
> and ban you
I was wrong about the banning; I misremembered that.
I did have a former job that would pay for Kagi for employees and I used Kagi for well over a year via that. When I left the job I went back to DDG to see if I would notice a quality drop, and I did not, so I decided not to pay for a personal account.
> A web browser designed from the ground-up.
Both of these can't be true. Perhaps they're thinking of Ladybird?
I don't think it's fair to deem it "dogshit" at this point.
It can be done today but it's a little bit of a pain and it lags behind Safari by some margin. Run `npx playwright wk <url>` if you have Playwright set up.
Unless you are on on Android, I guess.
[0] https://github.com/OrionBrowser
https://orionfeedback.org/d/2321-orion-for-windows-android-l...
That said, I still think the browser market is garbage for consumers.
Totally agree with you that is yet another fork with some privacy added on top, which is why I'm still not satisfied as a consumer with the market.
I really want to use it but basic things like password management kept breaking (I even tried switching between different options, like BitWarden - no luck).
Search and translate (and browse?) traces from authentic humans sounds valuable.
this is despite having had 1k-1.3k tabs open for prolonged periods (1+ months) and being able to search/browse through them easily.
Annoying regardless, but arguably Safari is doing the right thing here.
I suspect this is because I use several profiles amd each one in Orion is in effect a copy of the whole Orion browser whilst in Vivaldi less things a re duplicated. Or possibly my style of when to close things works better wehn an app has many profiles like Vivaldo or Safari rather than each profile is an app like Orion or Firefox.
For me, Orion’s vertical tabs are the best out of the box of all the browsers I’ve tried since I prefer their arbitrary nesting.
like attracts like?
Who wants to use a privacy-focused browser which isn't FOSS in this day and age, especially given the mature alternatives?
To farm that sweet data to sell to AI trainers is it?
I switched to Orion at some point, but due to bugs and battery drain, I had to switch back (to Safari!) As soon as those are fixed, I’m back again.
I’d also pay for it, if that changes anything. Actually, I would pay for the browser, period, if it was good, respected privacy, was efficient and fast on mobile, and synced things between devices.
Kagi, Rust, Claude. Just stop.
You are not innovators.