The Linux beta feels nice. Built-in ad-blocking and nested vertical tabs satisfies the two main things keeping me on Firefox (unnerfed uBlock Origin and Tree Style Tabs, respectively).
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.
Not only unusable, it's an outright security risk. Even the purportedly less scammy ad networks like Google sell ads to scammers and malware developers.
You're right. My elderly mom has fallen victim, or nearly fallen victim at least, to tons of ads or sponsored spots served within Facebook, which are a bit harder to block. They can also outrun DNS-based block lists, probably because LLM's are allowing crooks to move faster and be more prolific.
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.
I used to read the games site Rock Paper Shotgun. At some point they decided they were going to block everyone who blocked ads. There were ways around it but the writing had gone downhill so I chose to stop reading it entirely. A few months later I saw they had issued an apology for serving malware through their ads.
I will never, ever, under any circumstances stop using an adblocker.
Its been a while since I've seen an ad on Youtube since I got premium, but I remember, at least for a while, every ad on there was a scam. At some point I think Google realized nobody would stop them, so they just started accepting anyone who wanted to advertise with them.
As an ad-blocker user for years, I agree. On the flip side, how do blogs, news, and every day ad-serving websites survive without them? If it dies, it dies? Maybe this is not a discussion for here right now. But it's definitely something I've thought of. Not everyone want to pay for news.
> On the flip side, how do blogs, news, and every day ad-serving websites survive without them? If it dies, it dies?
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).
More like the quality ones get their content ripped and viewed for free with tools like archive.is or people just posting the full text in comments on this forum even.
Subs only aren’t viable for publications with full staff imo
> the quality ones get their content ripped and viewed for free with tools like archive.is
This is increasingly blocked by investigative outlets, particularly niche ones. It eventually filters through to folks who won’t or can’t pay. And for most people, that’s fine—they don’t need detailed and timely news.
I want to pay good sites for their content, but I don't think it's economical to expect a subscription from every semi-regular reader.
I'd like for the internet to settle on some sort of micro-transaction system where your browsing history pays out a fraction of a penny each time you browse to a site, so as long as you maintain a balance in your wallet, you can browse the web ad-free across all the sites that support the transaction system.
Doesn’t make sense commercially or socially. If you’re dabbling in specialist content, you’re fine waiting for it to filter out through ad-funded sources. The information density will be lower. And timing, too. But the whole point of the subscription is you have a stable base of financing and a committed community of knowledgeable people (likely in positions of power).
And practically speaking, the archive.is workarounds sort of are the solution for dabblers. It just taxes your time instead of wallet, which seems fair.
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.
I know few web sites that has unblockable ads. Mostly nerdy themed websites that has relationship with small nerdy webstores. They just host the ad themselves and it's a part of the site.
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
ads are not bad. if it's publisher ads/native ads.
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.
Highly debatable, IMO. They're already a net negative for society on their own. We'd probably have a healthier Internet if ads didn't create incentives for social media companies to get their users addicted to serve them more ads.
>> once people started publishing books or whatever in the 1600s - the world runs on ads.
I remember seeing old books (early victorian era) that were printed with healthy "subsidize" from the ad revenue. They honestly looked very much alike any site without ad blocker looks now. And I had the feeling that some content of the book was sponsored as well. Kept mentioning specific shops by name.
I wonder what did we do right, to stop books from looking like that? Maybe it could help us fix internet issues.
>remove the internet - forget the internet didn't exist.
Advertising as it exists today is tied to the Internet.
> you will see why the publishing business runs on ads.
And I maintain that tying business interests with advertising inevitably results in a conflict of interest between people producing goods and services, and people consuming them.
>it's only in the last 30 years - when ads got a bad rap
It's only natural that ads started being viewed in a more negative way as their effects were amplified by tech.
> due to tech bros who don't didn't learn humanities
Name calling doesn't add much to this discussion. My background is in humanities anyway.
I was putting it out as a generality - that most engineers/founders have no background in humanities. hence they don't tend to use 'logic' to make decisions that involve humans. when 'logic' doesn't work.
> now there's better tech to do native ads without the intrusion and massive bad experience .... the publisher themselves can serve you a small ad
This has always been possible and, from my recollections, was how some early online advertising was done. (I don't know if it was ever the dominant model, but it was certainly more common.)
I suspect the difficulty connecting content providers with advertisers is the root of them problem. After that, it takes effort to maintain that relationship. Having a third party handle everything is simply easier, especially for smaller web sites and smaller companies who want to advertise.
Ads are noise deliberately added to the signal. They're content you did not seek out and probably don't want. All advertisements are inherently untrustworthy: they're getting paid to sell you something, naturally they will exaggerate the positives and downplay the negatives. Conflicts of interest doesn't even begin to describe it.
That's the charitable interpretation. One could describe advertising as mind rape. You don't consent to it, you don't want it. They just keep trying to forcibly insert the data into your mind anyway. You block them, they bypass your blocker, which arguably makes them malware as well.
They feel entitled to our cognition, memories, attention. They think it's theirs to sell off to the highest bidder. They make it even harder for people with attention deficit to concentrate by trying to forcibly grab their attention. It's not only an accessibility problem, it's also a form of aggression, which makes uBlock Origin a form of justified self-defense.
100% agree. Everyone is susceptible to ads, even if few believe it. The ad pushers know it. It's a form of information warfare, not simply business. If I'm looking for a product and ask a vendor to give me pitch, great. But if I'm doing something else and vendor propaganda is forced on me interrupting my task, that's not ok in any way.
If I put out a native ad - uBlock Origin won't work on it. since it's just an html <p> tag or any other element.
the ad industry at large has caused damage - for you to think ads are not beneficial and intrusive or mind rape as you call it - through excessive mining, data selling.
but like an example - I gave - there's an article about cars - and in there there's a text item that says BMW or Cadillac has released a new V8 or electric sedans. if you're a car enthusiast that's relevant to you, if you're not - it's still information that maybe a year down the line - you might find relevant.
not logical but it works. and that's what runs the world - whether you like it or not. see the world as it is.
> If I put out a native ad - uBlock Origin won't work on it. since it's just an html <p> tag or any other element.
It absolutely will. I routinely block all sorts of elements on pages. If I think your <p> is annoying, it will get zapped with extreme prejudice.
> there's an article about cars - and in there there's a text item that says BMW or Cadillac has released a new V8 or electric sedans
That's just normal information. I don't consider it advertising. Users go to the site to read about cars, they're getting exactly what they wanted.
If I go to the market, it's because I want to see the products. If I open the app, it's because I want to see the offerings. If I come to HN, it's because I want to see submissions and comments.
In these cases, it's not advertising, it's the exact information I requested. It becomes advertising if they pay money to shove the products into my face while I'm trying to read a programming blog.
> not logical but it works. and that's what runs the world - whether you like it or not. see the world as it is.
Yeah, well the world sucks, the world is wrong and I'll fight it. I couldn't care less how much money they lose. My mind is sacred, and I don't have memory to waste on brands, slogans and jingles.
There is absolutely nothing stopping people from literally banning advertising. It's a very simple policy decision. People just have to develop the audacity to demand it.
so when you come to HN - and there's a story on the 1st Page about a YC company hiring - that you can't comment on - but just click.
to you is that an AD ?
for all contexts and purposes it's an ad. is it intrusive ? no. that's just a native ad. are you gonna zap it ? most times - just leaving it there makes sense than going through the effort of using the ublock origin picker.
To me it's just a submission. No different than a Show HN.
Marketing people seem to think that everything you do that advances your interests is advertising. Maintaining a good appearance is advertising, because you're "selling yourself". I don't subscribe to that definition.
By viewing ad supported content, you are inherently agreeing to see ads. That is the product being sold. If you don't want to see ads, don't load the content. It's very simple and plainly understandable.
People using all manner of backdoor techniques to sidestep the parts that they don't want, kills the demand to create a product they do want.
So rather than a paywalled news org that has no ads on the other side of the wall, we have ublock origin and archive.is
> By viewing ad supported content, you are inherently agreeing to see ads.
I agree to absolutely nothing, least of all "inherently". Following a link to a website gives exactly no one the right to assault me with advertising. If they try, I will defend myself with every single technology at my disposal.
> That is the product being sold.
Not a single thing is being sold here. Browsers make requests, servers can decide whether to reply or not. They're the ones who send web pages to anyone who asks for free.
They do so under the assumption that we'll look at the ads they bundled with the pages. We're under exactly zero obligation to validate that assumption.
If they want money, they should charge people directly. If they send us ads, we'll delete them.
> If you don't want to see ads, don't load the content.
I'm under no obligation to "not load" anything whatsoever. Browsers make requests, that's how the web works. If they reply with free web pages, I'm only too happy to consume them. If they don't like it, they're free to return HTTP 402 Payment Required.
> It's very simple and plainly understandable.
Apparently not, since you believe they are "selling" web pages. They're making a bet that giving us free web pages loaded with ads will pay off. They're not entitled to win that bet.
> People using all manner of backdoor techniques to sidestep the parts that they don't want
As is our god given right. Nothing "backdoor" about it either.
If someone hands me a magazine for free, I'm not obligated to look at the ads to "pay them back" or anything of the sort. In fact I can just rip out the ad pages and throw them in the trash, where they belong, and then fully enjoy my free gift.
Now why doesn't that logic apply to roadside farm stands?
Really I'd just like a general rule that we can apply to any [value transaction] to determine when compensation for that value is optional.
So I can quickly evaluate that I should leave money for the produce I take, but I optionally can leave money for the articles I read. Or perhaps roadside stands are fair game for "they could put a lock and on door and a phone to the house if they want compensation for their goods"?
> Now why doesn't that logic apply to roadside farm stands?
Because they are completely different categories of business. Stands don't give out free products to anyone who asks. Unlike web servers, they are actually selling stuff. You don't get products unless you pay for them. There is no "I'll give everyone free stuff then hope it comes back to me" deal.
> Really I'd just like a general rule that we can apply to any [value transaction] to determine when compensation for that value is optional.
If they give you the product for free, then compensation is optional. If they charge you money before giving you the product, then compensation is not optional.
..but they are not giving the product for free, they are putting ads on it. You're the one deciding to ignore the money basket because no one stops you from taking the product for free.
Still free. Attention is not a currency you can pay for things with. Bundling advertisements with free products doesn't magically turn them into paid products.
Further discussion is not possible unless you accept this.
..and putting a money basket in a farm stand doesn't mean the produce costs money?
And yes, advertisements definitely do cover hard costs like hosting (serving you is not free) and paying for the time/expertise to produce the content.
I don't know how you convinced yourself that digital data is worthless, but it's not and actually costs money to make and serve. Just like everything else you (hopefully) have no problem covering the cost of (you don't just take from farm stands, do you?)
> We should revive the micro payments feature that where built into very early browsers.
I don't think this was ever a thing. I know there's HTTP 402 and before 2000 there were some standards around payment being pursued but AFAIK nothing ever made it into browsers. Or am I missing something?
Paywalling with extremely easy, one-click payment of very small amount might work. Paywalling does still incentivize things like misleading, sensationalized click-bait titles, but that's pretty much the norm everywhere.
Alternatively, if there was a subscription that covered a massive amount of blogs/news bundled into one low-cost subscription, that might also work. What I heavily doubt is if donation-based micropayments will ever find enough users to remain profitable.
If you have a wallet configured to pay a microtransaction for each day you browse to a certain site (of for x # of page loads, although that could incentivize strange web site behavior to increase the number of pages a reader goes to while they visit), then your wallet pays the small payment when you first browse to the page and you get an ad-free experience.
Otherwise, ads or a subscription paywall, depending on how the site wants to manage revenue.
And it was a fine goal, but BAT did so many shady things (like blocking ads but then showing brave's own ads), and the PR poison that is anything cryptocurrency, meant that it was ultimately doomed to fail.
It has never worked and will never work. What has been proven to work is syndication, ie putting a giant amount of content behind a single paywall. Like Spotify, Netflix, Cable TV, other streamers do. Text publishers could easily do that if they wanted to. But it needs to be extremely broad, and not decided by ideological leanings or snobbery and such.
It's a tough question, I would be fine with ads if they were relevant to the content I'm looking at, minimal (ie; no motion, popups, covering up content), actually checked for safety so all the scam and phishing ads went away, and checked for performance so they didn't slow down a website so it's barely usable.
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!
I would be fine with a mode where the ads were corralled at the bottom of the page, but not loaded, with a disclosure triangle which would then allow me the option of viewing them if the content was credible enough that it seemed to me that the site content creators could be trusted to have signed up for ads which might have merit.
When I look a decade ahead, I think the advertiser internet model is going to die. People won't be using search engines anymore. They'll be using LLMs. They won't be reading blogs anymore. They'll be asking their LLMs. They won't be looking at review or recipe or travel sites anymore. They'll ask their LLMs.
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 also like the more browsers have built-in adblock, but so far I've never seen any of them copy uBlock Origin's "element picker" (the little eyedropper tool) feature... it's good for getting rid of annoying stuff on certain websites and only uBlock Origin seems to do it. :(
I also think it’s interesting that Ladybird is decidedly not including ad blocking, but leaving it to third party extensions. In some ways it makes a lot of sense to keep doing it that way.
> Couldn't trust a company funded by Google to maintain an ad blocker.
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.
It seems like they're indeed trying to sell “Orion+”, but it doesn't look like it buys you much besides bragging rights, in which case an Ardour-like business model of “source code is free but we charge for pre-built binaries” seems like it'd accomplish the same thing.
Are browser UIs themselves vectors for serious exploits?
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.
When a vendor bundles their own code with Webkit, it's quite easy for that vendor's code to have it's own security vulnerabilities, yes commonly in the UI, but also to open security vulnerabilities in Webkit. There's also no telling how much they've modified Webkit itself to make the rest of their code work. You simply cannot trust it and there are many security failure modes here. If you cannot inspect it all, you are trusting the vendor and I would be very careful trusting un-tested vendors of the most complex programs ever written which hold your credit cards and all of your logins probably your bank as well. I damn well would not trust the first few versions before the white hats have had a few years poking at it.
> What I'd really wish for is an EU browser that 'just works'.
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.
Not OP, but your comment had me looking into it: the fact that it's Firefox-based is reason enough to give it some consideration: the Chrome monopoly we are currently under is not compatible with a healthy and neutral web.
I've considered Zen, but the problem there is no Widevine, which means no DRM video.
I do love the design and how the interface has vertical and pinned / favorite tabs as its foundation. It's where I expect other browsers to go eventually.
There’s a lot of ways you can hold an engine wrong. Some 3rd party browser (often by security vendors…) have been vulnerable to exploits due to not compiling it with all the hardening options, or injecting vulnerable extensions that expose an attack surface to the webpage, for instance.
My main issue with Linux beta is the inability to sync with my Macbook and iPhone sessions. I move tabs between devices quite often in Firefox. Although, I will confess not spending much time looking at this problem or any solutions.
Agree with the lack of publicly-available source code.
I paid the one-time fee that gives you lifetime access to it over a year ago and it's been at least a year that I haven't used it (It was like $270USD or something... I can't remember).
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' **.
I have considered it, yes, lol. I'll do so. I've reported things in the past but I'm one of those people who feels like they're being a giant pain reporting too many things, especially something like this that I view as very low priority for most people. But hey, who knows!
Premature EDIT: oh, you're Vlad, lol. Thanks for the nudge! :D
I tried using Orion mobile for months but I just kept running into so many UI bugs that I had to switch away from it :(. I love Kagi, but Orion just feels unpolished right now
I still use it because I like how easy it is to use extensions on iOS but definitely agree that there are a lot of UI bugs. Listing the most prominent ones just in case the dev is around:
- 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.
Same for me. It was just so full of glitches - UI not responding, refusing to scroll, menu being inaccessible, pages somehow producing looping pop-up dialogs about not being able to render right and blocking the rest of the app...
Interesting, I get occasional glitches, mainly around placement of the text bar, but they are visual and don’t affect behavior. I’ve been living on the browser on iOS for about a year now and I enjoy it.
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.
I have been running Orion mobile on my iPhone for 3 or 4 years. Occasionally scrolling up or down would get stuck, but I haven't experienced that in a long time. I tend to do simple things though. Read HN, NYT, reddit, webtoons, and that is about it. The native ad-free experience is top.
Just so you know, "move to Europe" is pretty complicated inside Apple ecosystem. You can't move your App Store account from one country to another while you have any subscriptions active. You cancel them, wait for them to expire, and only then you can switch. So, for example, if you subscribed to an app yearly in January, and then cancelled your subscription in May, you still have to wait until January of next year. Very annoying in practice.
It's easier if you create a new apple ID which you use for the EU, separate from your existing one, and then login to the phone with your old Apple ID, and login to the app store specifically with the new one.
As a bonus, you can then re-buy all your apps if you want to not have to sometimes toggle between the old / new one to re-download already purchased apps.
Frankly, I'm surprised apple doesn't hard-require you to re-purchase all your apps when you switch regions, it would be a lot more apple-like.
While Apple has technically permitted third party browser engines in the EU, they have made it so onerous and expensive that no company is likely to build one. Apple remains the gatekeeper and will likely deny any builds for many years while they abuse the EU courts in delay tactics.
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.
It isn’t really, just marketing fluff. Foxify[1] allowed Firefox to install Chrome extensions almost a decade ago and then I ported that to Waterfox after privileged extension support was removed from Firefox 56.
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.
As a Firefox user, I make extensive usage of the location bar and the fact that Firefox allows you to search in history, bookmarks etc. etc.
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
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?
It was a design goal since we started working on it in 2019. (because why not?) It is basically a matter of time and devotion - we invested 7 years of development into it and while still not perfect (this is an incredibly messy problem!) a lot of people enjoy running their favorite extensions, even on iOS, which is truly unique to Orion.
Framing Russia’s unprovoked invasion of their neighbor as “politics” actually makes me less trusting of Kagi than before I read your link. It’s really not a good look.
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.
Except it is literally is just rational geopolitics. The story of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not just a single whimsical choice by a mad dictator. There has been a decades long encirclement campaign by NATO which ultimately pushed too far. That's not to say that states joining NATO did not do so willingly and of their own accord, but that it played into a larger struggle for influence that disadvantaged Russia on the world stage.
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.
Ukraine wanted to join NATO because it sees Russia as a threat (I dunno, maybe because Russia had just invaded Crimea and "annexed" it).
Russia's response is to invade Ukraine, slaughtering countless civilians, and has stated that it wants to take more territory around other former-soviet states.
And your reaction, to a country exercising its sovereignty, and another country invading it as a result, is "yup, that's just politics for ya"? That countries have the right to invade other countries if they feel disadvantaged by their neighbor's decisions?
Ukraine didn't just disadvantage their neighbor. In international affairs, red lines are a common tool for expressing acceptable bounds of negotiation. Russia made it very explicit that if Ukraine joined NATO there would be conflict. We live in the real world, and "sovereignty" is not real; nations are not unconstrained agents that can do whatever they please. They have to weigh the effects of their actions and be willing and capable of defending the consequences. This has been true for all of human history, has never changed, and likely never will. You simply deluded yourself into thinking otherwise.
I will also add that in the modern world, peace has largely been maintained because the value of international commerce is much greater than the value derived from conflict. Economic integration is the best recipe for enduring tranquility. However, the US has pursued broad economic sanctions against Russia since the annexation of Crimea, all but ensuring that an invasion of Ukraine would be a profitable (or at least not harmful). In other words, the United States miscalculated, overplayed it's hand in pursuing a containment strategy against Russia and ultimately invited violence.
Please look up "victim blaming" and understand how it applies in this context. If Islamic terrorists say "if you depict Muhammad, we will attack you", and someone depicts Muhammad and are attacked, we don't say "wow, they really shouldn't have depicted Muhammad, this is their fault". We say "wow, those terrorists are awful." Russia's red lines were never acceptable in the first place, and their existence does not justify war crimes.
> However, the US has pursued broad economic sanctions against Russia since the annexation of Crimea
Oh those poor Russians, they can't even violently annex neighboring territory without getting sanctioned. I feel so bad for them. We should have just uttered "tsk, tsk" and kicked them out of the olympics. That'll teach 'em!
No, the "economic tranquility" was the period after the Soviet Union fell and the entire western world was welcoming Russia in with open arms, and the economic integration was well under way. Until Putin came in and decided "no, I like things the way they were" and has been trying to bring back the USSR ever since. He doesn't want any economy he can't directly control by force. You think Putin wants economic integration? He wants his soviet union back.
None of what you're talking about is "politics" unless you think Russia actually has a leg to stand on with any of this. They don't. They never have. They're the aggressor here and none of the "warnings" they gave justify any of this.
I love the example you gave because it is demonstrative of one of the most important distinctions between your moral language and the language of geopolitics. If a Muslim attacks someone in a western country, then they will have violated a law. The recipient of the violence is a victim of an infringement of rights garunteed by the government which has authority through the social contract. On the world stage, there is no higher authority, rights, or laws. What you have are a set of nations, which by definition, are agents seeking to secure prosperity for themselves. Ukraine has certain objectives to secure their prosperity like, procuring a large conventional military or nukes so that they can defend their borders. Russia also has certain objectives that secure their prosperity, like maintaining access to the black sea and building natural gas pipelines into Europe. When these nations have objectives that conflict there are only two options: compromise or war, that's it, that is the reality. In this case neither side wanted to compromise, so there was a war.
It's also important to note that this conflict is not one-sided. Ukraine has dedicedly become a proxy for US and European power projection. This is not a genocide or some other form of needless violence. This is a classic example of powers butting heads and all parties refusing to take de-escalatory actions.
> I love the example you gave because it is demonstrative of one of the most important distinctions between your moral language and the language of geopolitics. If a Muslim attacks someone in a western country, then they will have violated a law.
Lol so we can only pass judgement on something if there exists a law that it violates, and an authority that can prosecute it. If there’s no ability to prosecute something, it must be fine, just fine!
> On the world stage, there is no higher authority, rights, or laws. What you have are a set of nations, which by definition, are agents seeking to secure prosperity for themselves.
> This is a classic example of powers butting heads
I keep imagine you looking at Hitler’s actions in the 1930s and concluding “there’s no higher authority than nation states, so this is all just geopolitics, powers butting heads” and refusing to make a judgement on good vs bad.
Maybe a good checksum on your world views is “if it results in what Hitler did being fine, maybe I need to reevaluate”.
--
I'll edit this to add: You bring up "distinctions between [my] moral language and the language of geopolitics"... that's what the whole objection to Kagi's founder is about. Confusing geopolitical decision making like "what should U.S. foreign policy be, if we want to maximize the chance of peace", and moral judgements, like "is invading your neighbors to get what you want ok", is the very thing Kagi's founder is doing that I find objectionable. Because you should be able to pass a moral judgement on an action without conflating that with whether the U.S. and its allies made the right strategic moves. It doesn't matter that Russia signaled their actions in advance, it's still not ok to invade another nation. One should be able to clearly see this to be true, and not just sweep it under "it's just politics." Calling it politics is both strictly speaking true, and also a cop-out, because you get to avoid actually making a judgement about whether you think it's right. Kagi's founder did that, and you're doing that here.
This is just idiotic equivocation. The difference between Russia and Hitler is that Russia has legitimate national security concerns, for instance, not letting the world's largest military alliance (NATO) which is antogonistic to them, build defense infrastructure along their border, or choke off their ability to have a navy. The Nazis made no attempts to conceal the fact that one of their main national objectives was to invade eastern Europe and create a colonial German empire. Clearly you can see these two things are not the same, right?
If Russia's national objective is to have access to the sea, and doing so means they have to take access from another nation, then no, I don't see how the things are different, except for maybe in magnitude (Hitler just did what Putin is doing, but more. France was building defense infrastructure along its border with Germany too, if you don't recall.) It's the exact same logic though: If you excuse states for invading each other because they have "national security concerns" that involve taking what they want from other nations, the same logic excuses Hitler's actions too. Putin has also made it very clear that one of Russia's goals is to essentially reestablish the soviet union (similar to hitler's feelings about germany's humiliation after WW1), the parallels here are stark.
The US could easily say today that it has a national security concern that it needs Greenland in order to have a good defensive posture against Russia now that the north sea is becoming more navigable. Does that make it morally right to just... invade and take Greenland? I assume that is your position, because it's essentially exactly what Russia is doing. (You don't need to respond if your answer is "Yes". This thread is getting long and if your position is indeed that countries can take what they want if they have "national security concerns", we're far enough apart that there's no reason to continue debating.)
I feel like even this simplifies the issue somewhat. While we can argue for days on whether or not this war is justified in any way, anyone with any glimpse of sanity can see that this is not an appropriate reaction to any such circumstances that may have contributed to the war. That's not to mention the actions of the russian military itself
> 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.
Blatant gaslighting. Ukraine is defending against an invasion. Russia has said it wants to go further and take what it can of Europe, states that the Baltics aren't countries and threatens us all with nukes on a daily basis.
In Europe we defend ourselves by funding Ukraine.
It is super simple; Russia attacks when it is strong enough and takes what it can.
We tried living in peace, we believed in it. We basically got rid of our armies in Europe, since everybody knows how to live in peace. Except Russia.
> everybody knows how to live in peace. Except Russia.
Talk about an extraordinary case of recency bias. Cheap shot, I know, but I had to make it.
Europe currently defends itself because that's all it CAN do. They abandoned their armies because the continent outsourced defense spending/industry to the United States and Russia following WWII.
This is so hilariously stupid, the invasion of Ukraine is so completely impossible to defend that all of these talking points smell like a third grader wrote them. In a rush, at the beginning of class.
“The moral dimension is illusory“
Yeah maybe if you glue your eyelids shut and pretend millions of dead people are actually totally fine, and definitely WORTH expending for… wait what is it that Russia has gained from this invasion?
Disgusting effort, I hope you never have control over a single ounce of power.
No. Russia invaded Ukraine. And while it wasn't a single whimsical choice, blaming NATA wrong. This was the mad dictator, and trying to cast blame on anyone else is the same as accepting the blame yourself.
I really wish there was a way to support their amazing product without a cent going the way of the Russian government. I get that there is a stance being taken, and it's an attempt to be apolitical, but that's in itself a political choice.
Assuming you are using American products, with the same logic how do you support that government? I’m honestly to curious, do you find that American government historians internal external politics is that much better than Russia? What’s going on with Israel and a massive track record of human rights violations including government funded torture oriented, democracy side stepping institutions like Guantanamo bay, and many more current and previous heinous acts.
Yes, in Russia you have less freedom, more corruption, lower quality of life, mor thuggery etc and so on.
For who is greater enemy see my point (2) and I understand that for someone directly familiar with United Fruit Company type of adventures USA may be greater enemy despite being overall less evil.
"South Americans"
Nobody in my country considers going to Russia. They did in the 80's, but not since the 90's. People still go to cuba to study, but many abandon what they consider intolerable conditions, and all those I know didn't have any desire to stay after their plans.
If you meant something else, excluding Venezuela, please tell me.
I feel it’s more a failure of regulation, it’s almost impossible to become a new search engine these days without using an existing index. There’s not many choices for that, Google won’t give you the data, Bing won’t so there’s basically only Yandex left.
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.
Or create a new partnership with various like minded organizations and create a new index that each can use in their own way (perhaps those you mention plus DuckDuckGo and others that my brain isn't bringing to mind right now [maybe Wikipedia, EFF, internet archive, maybe Nebius would help...]).
I know this wouldn't be easy but maybe such an arrangement would be possible where there is some shared index and then the partners can each use it, extend it... in their own way.
I could see a collaborative open source web index run by the WMF, Internet Archive, EFF, GNU, DuckDuckGo, and Kagi being too big to simply ignore like a previous commenter suggested might happen to a new index. I could also see Qwant being interested
Bigger search engines have a lot of custom integrations that are not just crawling the clear web. You have a lot of benefits from collecting data for a longer time in this market.
I've often switched between Google and DDG but always came back to Google as in direct comparisons I was always not finding the right results in DDG. Kagi is the first time that I have not switched back a single time as nothing changed negatively in the quality and quantity of the results.
It's a noble goal to have your own search index, but it's duplicating a lot of work that others with much more resources already do well.
In practice it is no longer actually possible to create a new search index with anywhere near the breadth of Google, regardless of the amount of resources you have available. Google (and to a lesser extant the couple of other historic engines) are entrenched enough to be allowed access by webmasters in robots.txt. And in the new era of mass abusive scraping by LLM companies, there's no longer the option to ignore robots.txt and scrape anyway, as sites do anything and everything they can to block any and all scrapers besides those already firmly entrenched.
Japan should be the last country with a complaint. Read up on unit 731, at least, if you are unaware of the rape of Nanking or it does not convince you.
That's a valid reason to use them and very pragmatic of Kagi. Sometimes jurisdiction A wants to hide something but it's on jurisdiction B's search results. If I were a Kagi subscriber I wouldn't want my search degraded because of a vocal minority.
This is why I subscribe to Kagi. Google has been censoring topics for years, for many reasons. I have a few domains I use to test whether a search engine has been censored, and Kagi passes all of them. For example, many years ago, Google deleted the Proud Boys website from search. I believe they have deleted later iterations as well. No doubt there are millions of other website they've deleted, suppressed, or down-ranked. They're not transparent about this process or how the decisions are made. Of course I don't support or condone the Proud Boys. That is not the point. The point is that I should be allowed to search for information and make up my own mind.
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.
Getting from using Yandex to funding Putin‘s war requires quite a few turns. Since most of Russia’s war chest is filled by money from oil exports and China indirectly also supports Russia materially, I would first cut myself off of all oil-based products, and then from the Chinese supply chain of goods, and only then cut products indluding Yandex search results. In that order, because that matters for the war chest.
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.
> Yandex divested their Russian side of the business and are Dutch
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.)
"In July 2024, in a transaction brought about by international sanctions during the Russian invasion of Ukraine and restrictions on foreign ownership, Nebius Group, the Dutch holding company that owned Yandex, sold its Russian assets to a group of Russian investors for a discounted price of US$5.3 billion"
This. Just cleaned up my t-shirt shelf and need to archive the nice yellow T-shirt they sent to early adopters. Not wearing it.. (Obviously it goes for the services as well). Not happy at all.
I find it interesting that it uses GTK, something quite unusual for a proprietary app. In any case, I am not using it, because I don't want to use a nonfree WWW browser.
I only started using it about 6 months ago so I don't know what it was like before, but today it's a solid choice. far less problematic than Chrome or Firefox or Arc or Dia or Brave or any of the other browsers I had on my system. Orion was the first browser that let me delete all the rest and haven't run into any issues in months. Some of the other comments show they hadn't used it in a long time. 1Password works perfectly as does Apple Pay.
Tried switching a while back. It's like Safari but with so many little UI improvements that make it so much more enjoyable but while still feeling like something Apple would design. Alas didn't use long as lack to many things such as no native Apple Pay support (have to use iOS or scan a code etc), or 2fa email/sms auto fill, private relay support, doesn't fully support 1Password, and so on. Most all of which because of Apple limitations but still little things that I value more than the better UI. However, far more important than all of that is so many sites didn't work. With Chrome you know a site will work, with Safari you know a lot may not, but with Orion it was an enormous number of sites that continually ran into issues and unlike Safari too many to keep reporting or find work arounds. All the benefits of Safari make it worth the downside of some sites not working properly, but the benefits of Orion over Safari for the massive number that didn't work right was certainly not worth it for me. Which was all unfortunate since the Orion team is doing everything they can essentially on their end. Hopefully they have a large enough niche to stick around and offer even modest competition for the big players.
I am using Orion on Mac and iOS for a few years now and I cannot disagree more.
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.
Kagi is not a pro privacy company except inasmuch as they currently consider privacy to be profitable.
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.
> 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.
Can you provide any evidence of them having done this? As a paying Kagi subscriber, I am surely interested in knowing more.
If you click the link in my earlier comment, the author of that post goes into that including screenshots from the Kagi discord. It's the last thing before the postmortem.
> and ban you
I was wrong about the banning; I misremembered that.
Strange, I don't remember seeing the blog post link there - I must have just skipped over that. In general I found some parts provided interesting info (e.g. Kagi bought a t-shirt producer, Kagi started out as an AI company in 2018), both with links to Kagi's own blog articles; some I found a bit naive (the tax stuff, which can easily be the case and doesn't have to be a conspiracy); and some just politics between the author and the Kagi founder. In general a lot of it came down to how the author feels about Kagi, by my estimation at least.
> I was wrong about the banning; I misremembered that.
Sort of a big thing to accuse them of and then realize you just "misremembered". At a min you could edit your earlier comment to note this.
The blog post certainly has a number of unrelated gripes about Kagi. At the end, though, it's very much concretely the case that the CEO of Kagi feels that "A lot of Kagi customers care about privacy. Therefore Kagi would never do something anti-privacy, because we would lose customers".
That is to say, Kagi's stance is financial, not out of actually valuing privacy. Usually when companies are in this situation, it winds up being that they care more about appearances than reality, and will do what they think they can get away with. It's a wholly untrustworthy position for them to be in and for the CEO to present it otherwise decreases my confidence that he'll do the right thing.
> Sort of a big thing to accuse them of and then realize you just "misremembered". At a min you could edit your earlier comment to note this.
HN comments are not able to be edited (or deleted) after a somewhat brief period of time, which had already passed before I realized my error. The best I can do is correct myself in a followup comment, which is what I did.
They can give me as good a guarantee as any search engine can that they pinkie promise they aren't selling your data.
What keeps me with kagi is the quality. It is night and day using it and using other search engines. Even if they sold my searches, I'd still use them in a heartbeat.
That's fair. Personally I don't find their searches to be sufficiently better than DDG that I will open my wallet.
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.
Is this the same "Kagi" that used to manage shareware license purchases (primarily for Mac) 30 years ago? I assumed it was as this Kagi also seems to be Apple-centric, but that Kagi was run by a man named Key (Key Netherly or something like that), not Vlad.
WebKit is a rendering engine, not a browser. It's a bit like saying "that isn't original art because you used Earth physics that govern how paint flows and dries.
I dunno. It's more like saying "that isn't your original art because you didn't paint it, only provided the frame". A pretty elaborate frame, yes, but only the frame, not the painting.
I think this is underselling the browser UX. In many ways, Safari, Orion, Chrome, Brave, Opera, are all very different products despite all sharing the WebKit lineage.
The particular choice of the marketing phrase "from the ground up" sort of invites this kind of commentary on HN. This is hardly the first WebKit-based browser, so any commenter specifically holding their breath for a new, independent rendering and layout engine or JS engine might feel inclined to roll their eyes and snark.
Using it for years on iOS and Mac. Works great and the only zero telemetry browser. Apple Pay works and the compatibility button fixes any problem site worth loading. No complaints.
fair enough - librewolf - same as Orion: 18.29 fingerprint uniqueness - I dont know the other browsers except Tor. I use librewolf too with privacy badger and librejs - good browser
A good webkit-based browser on Windows might mean people actually start bothering to test things in that browser family.
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.
I'm a heavy user of Google Drive, Docs, Sheets etc. for work. Does the suite work better with Orion now? It's the one thing that forced me off of Orion and back to Firefox. Or perhaps I need to really invest in finding a functional alternative to the Google suite. And I'm reading that Orion supports containers now, which is a feature I also love.
i remember seeing this thread. will be cool for windows users to have a webkit option again (are there any webkit-based browsers there since safari quit being made for it?). i will certainly be interested in trying out the android version when it comes around and have been testing out the linux version since it dropped.
i’ve been daily-driving this on my iphone for almost 9 months now & its amazing. the built-in adblocker works wonders and fwiw, i haven’t faced that many bugs compared to what i see from other users.
this is despite having had 1k-1.3k tabs open for prolonged periods (1+ months) and being able to search/browse through them easily.
Tried Orion again two weeks ago. It's almost there for me, but the lack of history sync between devices and its battery consumption are dealbreakers for me. I love it otherwise!!!
Orion syncs history, natively though iCloud sync. Battery consumption should be on par or better than Safari (because Orion has native ad-clocking). If this isn't the case, it is unusual and worth digging deeper into.
Hey, Vlad! History did not sync between Orion on my MacBook and Orion on my iPhone. Bookmarks synced, however. I was running the latest version on all devices. Perhaps it's PEBKAC; I'll give it another go, as using Orion was an excellent experience otherwise.
At least it's WebKit and not just a reskin of Chrome, but I don't exactly get why Kagi feel that they need to develop their own browser. Personally I prefer my search and browser to be developed be separate entities that can focus on doing one thing really well.
Yes, and you need an army of people to "wrap" WebKit just like that. E.g., the WebKit port on Haiku, of course, is not in good shape because it has more code than the whole of their OS. EFL once had a WebBrowser control/component, maintained by Tizen devs, but of course, it has now been removed. There is no manpower to maintain such control.
I switched from brave(ios) to Orion about a month ago and almost I didn't look back. Some ui bug and certain website bit playing along(reddit) but it's OK.
I tried the browser, and honestly, it works very fast and is very convenient. I will give it a one week trial, and give Arc a one week break. Let's see how this develops.
I'm giving it a try after a couple months of daily driving with Zen, which I've become quite fond of. One potential deal-breaker is that it seems to be impossible to log into GitHub. After autofilling my credentials from the keychain, the form submits, and then I get redirected right back to the form with no error message. The same thing happens when I try logging in with my passkey. Has anyone else run into this and found a workaround? I tried turning off auto-submitting password forms in the Settings but that doesn't change anything.
I will suggest people to use helium browser over this closed source browser. I know kagi is good company, but i don't understand why they aren't open sourcing browser.
My main gripe with this is the pretty shocking performance on old "supported" iOS devices (e.g. an iPhone SE 2). When you have too many tabs, or watch more than a couple videos it just starts freezing and will sometimes crash the phone - you get an unresponsive sideshow screen for a bit before it goes to the lock screen with fingerprint login disabled (like after a restart). I can only assume they've accidentally found a way to make webkit leak memory?
I find it shocking that it works fine on a totally unsupported iPhone 7 (2016). With extensions! Not the latest build (unfortunately, they bumped the minimum iOS version to 17.0 recently), and I haven't stress-tested it with many tabs, but still.
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.
I had used the built-in password managers in browsers for years when using Android. Since I switched to iPhone, I couldn’t be happier with Apple Passwords.
Don't marry yourself to the Apple (or any other large vendor) ecosystem. I use Keepass variants on my Linux and Android devices, it's absolutely terrific.
Yeah. Right after typing that I was reminded how much of a nightmare trying to recover access to an Apple account is. I recently had to do it for a friend and it was nerve wracking, there was a very real chance of being permanently locked out if you take the wrong step.
Has it gotten any better in the past 6 months on Mac (UI glitches, password management)?
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).
In the same way that I'm uncomfortable with Opera since it went Chinese and Chrome from all its corporate spyware, I'll be skipping over the Russian stuff.
I really, really hope they release the source for this, if not just the code for extensions so Epiphany can finally be usable for more than basic websearch
paid $270 for a lifetime browser license and then didn't use it for a year, which honestly makes it the most authentic lifetime subscription I've ever heard of
Been looking for a browser to replace Chrome which is very difficult I know. But Chrome just gets so bloated that my M1 Macbook Air is not able to run it anymore. How good is this browser in terms of actual daily performance?
I use Safari all the time as well, but it doesn't behave very well with Reddit (keeps closing and reopening tabs due to "too much memory" problems. Other than that, it works for 99.9% of everything else.
Usually when sites get reloaded after sitting for a while due to “too much memory” it means the site has a memory leak (or several) that it’s owner has chosen to not address.
Annoying regardless, but arguably Safari is doing the right thing here.
I have just switched from Orion to Vivaldi partially as it seems to use less memory.
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.
I have hundreds of open tabs in Brave at all times on my M2 MBA and it's fine. It puts tabs to sleep when inactive and is generally quite usable. Also supports all the same extensions as Chrome (plus older ones that Chrome doesn't support).
That was my thought. It was only released in 2020, and to great performance fanfare. To be 'not able to run it anymore' seems like it could be infested with a number of undesirables.
Been a big fan Brave for a while. I just recently learned about Brave Origin, the core browser with all the crypto/ads/etc removed, free for linux and one-time payment for others: https://brave.com/origin/
I’ve used it daily almost since it was released without any real issues. But I generally do not run too many extensions or probably push the limits of my browsers.
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.
Depends on the platform, I expect. I love the feature set and layout, but it's been unusable for me as a daily driver on Linux from various bugs. I'll be giving it another honest go when it's out of beta.
Yeah. I also noticed a fairly significant speed increase when I started using Safari again. Unfortunate. There are just too many features that Safari supports perfectly, that Orion either doesn't support at all, or has flakey support for. Especially the Apple ecosystem ones, which I'd think Apple doesn't expose, but Chrome seems to support some of them just fine, like 2fa codes.
We'd like to hear more about that - I've been using Orion for the last 6 years and checking Safari every month, cant say Safari ever felt faster than Orion. Must be a specific use case. So if you can be conrete in providing feedback, that would indeed be valuable.
A browser option that isn't a Chromium reskin and isn't Firefox... it does seem like a while since we've seen one of those. I've used Kagi a bit and I've been pretty impressed with how well they desloppify their results. I might have to give this a try.
The Linux beta feels nice. Built-in ad-blocking and nested vertical tabs satisfies the two main things keeping me on Firefox (unnerfed uBlock Origin and Tree Style Tabs, respectively).
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.
> Built-in ad-blocking
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.
Not only unusable, it's an outright security risk. Even the purportedly less scammy ad networks like Google sell ads to scammers and malware developers.
You're right. My elderly mom has fallen victim, or nearly fallen victim at least, to tons of ads or sponsored spots served within Facebook, which are a bit harder to block. They can also outrun DNS-based block lists, probably because LLM's are allowing crooks to move faster and be more prolific.
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.
I used to read the games site Rock Paper Shotgun. At some point they decided they were going to block everyone who blocked ads. There were ways around it but the writing had gone downhill so I chose to stop reading it entirely. A few months later I saw they had issued an apology for serving malware through their ads.
I will never, ever, under any circumstances stop using an adblocker.
Its been a while since I've seen an ad on Youtube since I got premium, but I remember, at least for a while, every ad on there was a scam. At some point I think Google realized nobody would stop them, so they just started accepting anyone who wanted to advertise with them.
As an ad-blocker user for years, I agree. On the flip side, how do blogs, news, and every day ad-serving websites survive without them? If it dies, it dies? Maybe this is not a discussion for here right now. But it's definitely something I've thought of. Not everyone want to pay for news.
> On the flip side, how do blogs, news, and every day ad-serving websites survive without them? If it dies, it dies?
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).
> how do blogs, news, and every day ad-serving websites survive without them?
Same as they do now. The quality ones charge for their content. The low-quality ones survive on serving ads to the masses.
There is a third option, that the content does not need to be monetized.
Full time journalists do in fact enjoy eating like the rest of us.
The parent comment mentioned "blogs" and "everyday websites."
Do you want to make a case for why exactly a percentage increase calculator app needs ads?
More like the quality ones get their content ripped and viewed for free with tools like archive.is or people just posting the full text in comments on this forum even.
Subs only aren’t viable for publications with full staff imo
> the quality ones get their content ripped and viewed for free with tools like archive.is
This is increasingly blocked by investigative outlets, particularly niche ones. It eventually filters through to folks who won’t or can’t pay. And for most people, that’s fine—they don’t need detailed and timely news.
I want to pay good sites for their content, but I don't think it's economical to expect a subscription from every semi-regular reader.
I'd like for the internet to settle on some sort of micro-transaction system where your browsing history pays out a fraction of a penny each time you browse to a site, so as long as you maintain a balance in your wallet, you can browse the web ad-free across all the sites that support the transaction system.
> micro-transaction system
Doesn’t make sense commercially or socially. If you’re dabbling in specialist content, you’re fine waiting for it to filter out through ad-funded sources. The information density will be lower. And timing, too. But the whole point of the subscription is you have a stable base of financing and a committed community of knowledgeable people (likely in positions of power).
And practically speaking, the archive.is workarounds sort of are the solution for dabblers. It just taxes your time instead of wallet, which seems fair.
> Not everyone want to pay for news.
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.
I know few web sites that has unblockable ads. Mostly nerdy themed websites that has relationship with small nerdy webstores. They just host the ad themselves and it's a part of the site.
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
ads are not bad. if it's publisher ads/native ads.
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.
> ads are not bad.
Highly debatable, IMO. They're already a net negative for society on their own. We'd probably have a healthier Internet if ads didn't create incentives for social media companies to get their users addicted to serve them more ads.
remove the internet - forget the internet didn't exist.
you will see why the publishing business runs on ads. see the world for what it is not what you want it to be.
once people started publishing books or whatever in the 1600s - the world runs on ads.
it's only in the last 30 years - when ads got a bad rap due to tech bros who don't didn't learn humanities
>> once people started publishing books or whatever in the 1600s - the world runs on ads.
I remember seeing old books (early victorian era) that were printed with healthy "subsidize" from the ad revenue. They honestly looked very much alike any site without ad blocker looks now. And I had the feeling that some content of the book was sponsored as well. Kept mentioning specific shops by name.
I wonder what did we do right, to stop books from looking like that? Maybe it could help us fix internet issues.
> it's only in the last 30 years - when ads got a bad rap due to tech bros who don't didn't learn humanities
LOL, I take it you never saw the "doctors recommend Camel cigarettes" ads.
Advertising is a plague.
>remove the internet - forget the internet didn't exist.
Advertising as it exists today is tied to the Internet.
> you will see why the publishing business runs on ads.
And I maintain that tying business interests with advertising inevitably results in a conflict of interest between people producing goods and services, and people consuming them.
>it's only in the last 30 years - when ads got a bad rap
It's only natural that ads started being viewed in a more negative way as their effects were amplified by tech.
> due to tech bros who don't didn't learn humanities
Name calling doesn't add much to this discussion. My background is in humanities anyway.
my apologies if you felt I was name calling you.
I was putting it out as a generality - that most engineers/founders have no background in humanities. hence they don't tend to use 'logic' to make decisions that involve humans. when 'logic' doesn't work.
> now there's better tech to do native ads without the intrusion and massive bad experience .... the publisher themselves can serve you a small ad
This has always been possible and, from my recollections, was how some early online advertising was done. (I don't know if it was ever the dominant model, but it was certainly more common.)
I suspect the difficulty connecting content providers with advertisers is the root of them problem. After that, it takes effort to maintain that relationship. Having a third party handle everything is simply easier, especially for smaller web sites and smaller companies who want to advertise.
> ads are not bad
Ads are noise deliberately added to the signal. They're content you did not seek out and probably don't want. All advertisements are inherently untrustworthy: they're getting paid to sell you something, naturally they will exaggerate the positives and downplay the negatives. Conflicts of interest doesn't even begin to describe it.
That's the charitable interpretation. One could describe advertising as mind rape. You don't consent to it, you don't want it. They just keep trying to forcibly insert the data into your mind anyway. You block them, they bypass your blocker, which arguably makes them malware as well.
They feel entitled to our cognition, memories, attention. They think it's theirs to sell off to the highest bidder. They make it even harder for people with attention deficit to concentrate by trying to forcibly grab their attention. It's not only an accessibility problem, it's also a form of aggression, which makes uBlock Origin a form of justified self-defense.
100% agree. Everyone is susceptible to ads, even if few believe it. The ad pushers know it. It's a form of information warfare, not simply business. If I'm looking for a product and ask a vendor to give me pitch, great. But if I'm doing something else and vendor propaganda is forced on me interrupting my task, that's not ok in any way.
If I put out a native ad - uBlock Origin won't work on it. since it's just an html <p> tag or any other element.
the ad industry at large has caused damage - for you to think ads are not beneficial and intrusive or mind rape as you call it - through excessive mining, data selling.
but like an example - I gave - there's an article about cars - and in there there's a text item that says BMW or Cadillac has released a new V8 or electric sedans. if you're a car enthusiast that's relevant to you, if you're not - it's still information that maybe a year down the line - you might find relevant.
not logical but it works. and that's what runs the world - whether you like it or not. see the world as it is.
> If I put out a native ad - uBlock Origin won't work on it. since it's just an html <p> tag or any other element.
It absolutely will. I routinely block all sorts of elements on pages. If I think your <p> is annoying, it will get zapped with extreme prejudice.
> there's an article about cars - and in there there's a text item that says BMW or Cadillac has released a new V8 or electric sedans
That's just normal information. I don't consider it advertising. Users go to the site to read about cars, they're getting exactly what they wanted.
If I go to the market, it's because I want to see the products. If I open the app, it's because I want to see the offerings. If I come to HN, it's because I want to see submissions and comments.
In these cases, it's not advertising, it's the exact information I requested. It becomes advertising if they pay money to shove the products into my face while I'm trying to read a programming blog.
> not logical but it works. and that's what runs the world - whether you like it or not. see the world as it is.
Yeah, well the world sucks, the world is wrong and I'll fight it. I couldn't care less how much money they lose. My mind is sacred, and I don't have memory to waste on brands, slogans and jingles.
There is absolutely nothing stopping people from literally banning advertising. It's a very simple policy decision. People just have to develop the audacity to demand it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
so when you come to HN - and there's a story on the 1st Page about a YC company hiring - that you can't comment on - but just click.
to you is that an AD ?
for all contexts and purposes it's an ad. is it intrusive ? no. that's just a native ad. are you gonna zap it ? most times - just leaving it there makes sense than going through the effort of using the ublock origin picker.
To me it's just a submission. No different than a Show HN.
Marketing people seem to think that everything you do that advances your interests is advertising. Maintaining a good appearance is advertising, because you're "selling yourself". I don't subscribe to that definition.
>You don't consent to it, you don't want it.
By viewing ad supported content, you are inherently agreeing to see ads. That is the product being sold. If you don't want to see ads, don't load the content. It's very simple and plainly understandable.
People using all manner of backdoor techniques to sidestep the parts that they don't want, kills the demand to create a product they do want.
So rather than a paywalled news org that has no ads on the other side of the wall, we have ublock origin and archive.is
> By viewing ad supported content, you are inherently agreeing to see ads.
I agree to absolutely nothing, least of all "inherently". Following a link to a website gives exactly no one the right to assault me with advertising. If they try, I will defend myself with every single technology at my disposal.
> That is the product being sold.
Not a single thing is being sold here. Browsers make requests, servers can decide whether to reply or not. They're the ones who send web pages to anyone who asks for free.
They do so under the assumption that we'll look at the ads they bundled with the pages. We're under exactly zero obligation to validate that assumption.
If they want money, they should charge people directly. If they send us ads, we'll delete them.
> If you don't want to see ads, don't load the content.
I'm under no obligation to "not load" anything whatsoever. Browsers make requests, that's how the web works. If they reply with free web pages, I'm only too happy to consume them. If they don't like it, they're free to return HTTP 402 Payment Required.
> It's very simple and plainly understandable.
Apparently not, since you believe they are "selling" web pages. They're making a bet that giving us free web pages loaded with ads will pay off. They're not entitled to win that bet.
> People using all manner of backdoor techniques to sidestep the parts that they don't want
As is our god given right. Nothing "backdoor" about it either.
If someone hands me a magazine for free, I'm not obligated to look at the ads to "pay them back" or anything of the sort. In fact I can just rip out the ad pages and throw them in the trash, where they belong, and then fully enjoy my free gift.
Ok, I follow.
Now why doesn't that logic apply to roadside farm stands?
Really I'd just like a general rule that we can apply to any [value transaction] to determine when compensation for that value is optional.
So I can quickly evaluate that I should leave money for the produce I take, but I optionally can leave money for the articles I read. Or perhaps roadside stands are fair game for "they could put a lock and on door and a phone to the house if they want compensation for their goods"?
> Now why doesn't that logic apply to roadside farm stands?
Because they are completely different categories of business. Stands don't give out free products to anyone who asks. Unlike web servers, they are actually selling stuff. You don't get products unless you pay for them. There is no "I'll give everyone free stuff then hope it comes back to me" deal.
> Really I'd just like a general rule that we can apply to any [value transaction] to determine when compensation for that value is optional.
If they give you the product for free, then compensation is optional. If they charge you money before giving you the product, then compensation is not optional.
..but they are not giving the product for free, they are putting ads on it. You're the one deciding to ignore the money basket because no one stops you from taking the product for free.
> ..but they are not giving the product for free
They are. Not a single cent changed hands.
> they are putting ads on it
Still free. Attention is not a currency you can pay for things with. Bundling advertisements with free products doesn't magically turn them into paid products.
Further discussion is not possible unless you accept this.
..and putting a money basket in a farm stand doesn't mean the produce costs money?
And yes, advertisements definitely do cover hard costs like hosting (serving you is not free) and paying for the time/expertise to produce the content.
I don't know how you convinced yourself that digital data is worthless, but it's not and actually costs money to make and serve. Just like everything else you (hopefully) have no problem covering the cost of (you don't just take from farm stands, do you?)
We should revive the micro payments feature that where built into very early browsers.
It didn’t catch on back then. But time are changing.
I don't remember that, though I only started with early Netscape. Do you have more detail?
It wasn't in Mosaic either so I have no idea where they took that fact from.
pretty sure the guy from TPB had a micro-payments/donation startup around the time when everyone was using Facebook like buttons on their websites.
That was a decade after anything I would think of as early browsers, much less very early browsers.
> We should revive the micro payments feature that where built into very early browsers.
I don't think this was ever a thing. I know there's HTTP 402 and before 2000 there were some standards around payment being pursued but AFAIK nothing ever made it into browsers. Or am I missing something?
Paywalling with extremely easy, one-click payment of very small amount might work. Paywalling does still incentivize things like misleading, sensationalized click-bait titles, but that's pretty much the norm everywhere.
Alternatively, if there was a subscription that covered a massive amount of blogs/news bundled into one low-cost subscription, that might also work. What I heavily doubt is if donation-based micropayments will ever find enough users to remain profitable.
Well, Ted Nelson wanted that w/ Xanadu and Autodesk spent a fair bit of money on that....
Not donation-based.
If you have a wallet configured to pay a microtransaction for each day you browse to a certain site (of for x # of page loads, although that could incentivize strange web site behavior to increase the number of pages a reader goes to while they visit), then your wallet pays the small payment when you first browse to the page and you get an ad-free experience.
Otherwise, ads or a subscription paywall, depending on how the site wants to manage revenue.
I believe that was an intent/goal of BAT in Brave.
And it was a fine goal, but BAT did so many shady things (like blocking ads but then showing brave's own ads), and the PR poison that is anything cryptocurrency, meant that it was ultimately doomed to fail.
It has never worked and will never work. What has been proven to work is syndication, ie putting a giant amount of content behind a single paywall. Like Spotify, Netflix, Cable TV, other streamers do. Text publishers could easily do that if they wanted to. But it needs to be extremely broad, and not decided by ideological leanings or snobbery and such.
I can see Substack attempting this, and being opt-in for publishers. But I can't imagine this being good for independent publishers.
It's a tough question, I would be fine with ads if they were relevant to the content I'm looking at, minimal (ie; no motion, popups, covering up content), actually checked for safety so all the scam and phishing ads went away, and checked for performance so they didn't slow down a website so it's barely usable.
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!
I would be fine with a mode where the ads were corralled at the bottom of the page, but not loaded, with a disclosure triangle which would then allow me the option of viewing them if the content was credible enough that it seemed to me that the site content creators could be trusted to have signed up for ads which might have merit.
99.9% of people would not intentionally enable ads even if they liked the content this is an insanely unrealistic option.
When I look a decade ahead, I think the advertiser internet model is going to die. People won't be using search engines anymore. They'll be using LLMs. They won't be reading blogs anymore. They'll be asking their LLMs. They won't be looking at review or recipe or travel sites anymore. They'll ask their LLMs.
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 also like the more browsers have built-in adblock, but so far I've never seen any of them copy uBlock Origin's "element picker" (the little eyedropper tool) feature... it's good for getting rid of annoying stuff on certain websites and only uBlock Origin seems to do it. :(
Brave has it on both desktop and mobile https://brave.com/privacy-updates/34-block-page-elements-and...
I also think it’s interesting that Ladybird is decidedly not including ad blocking, but leaving it to third party extensions. In some ways it makes a lot of sense to keep doing it that way.
Ladybird is natively integrating Brave's adblock engine https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/pull/9587
> Couldn't trust a company funded by Google to maintain an ad blocker.
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.
> Transparency is a dependency of trust.
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.
I don't understand what the point of keeping a browser closed-source is. Are they trying to monetize it or something?
It seems like they're indeed trying to sell “Orion+”, but it doesn't look like it buys you much besides bragging rights, in which case an Ardour-like business model of “source code is free but we charge for pre-built binaries” seems like it'd accomplish the same thing.
I think FOSS is far better. Restrictive licenses lead to much less people inspecting and working with the code.
> less people
Less agents these days
Are browser UIs themselves vectors for serious exploits?
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.
When a vendor bundles their own code with Webkit, it's quite easy for that vendor's code to have it's own security vulnerabilities, yes commonly in the UI, but also to open security vulnerabilities in Webkit. There's also no telling how much they've modified Webkit itself to make the rest of their code work. You simply cannot trust it and there are many security failure modes here. If you cannot inspect it all, you are trusting the vendor and I would be very careful trusting un-tested vendors of the most complex programs ever written which hold your credit cards and all of your logins probably your bank as well. I damn well would not trust the first few versions before the white hats have had a few years poking at it.
> 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.
The problem is you're stuck at assuming, but can't verify.
This in particular is not very difficult to verify
I mean, if you're really worried just test for support of certain features or absence of bugs that are only in the newest WebKit.
> What I'd really wish for is an EU browser that 'just works'.
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.
Not OP, but your comment had me looking into it: the fact that it's Firefox-based is reason enough to give it some consideration: the Chrome monopoly we are currently under is not compatible with a healthy and neutral web.
I've considered Zen, but the problem there is no Widevine, which means no DRM video.
I do love the design and how the interface has vertical and pinned / favorite tabs as its foundation. It's where I expect other browsers to go eventually.
There’s a lot of ways you can hold an engine wrong. Some 3rd party browser (often by security vendors…) have been vulnerable to exploits due to not compiling it with all the hardening options, or injecting vulnerable extensions that expose an attack surface to the webpage, for instance.
My main issue with Linux beta is the inability to sync with my Macbook and iPhone sessions. I move tabs between devices quite often in Firefox. Although, I will confess not spending much time looking at this problem or any solutions.
Agree with the lack of publicly-available source code.
I paid the one-time fee that gives you lifetime access to it over a year ago and it's been at least a year that I haven't used it (It was like $270USD or something... I can't remember).
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' **.
I appreciate that you are very particular about UI. Have you considered opening a thread on orionfeedback.org and sharing some of the thoughts/ideas?
And thanks for the support, being completely user-funded is what makes developing Orion fun!
Have you guys done any account pruning? I haven't logged in in a year and my creds no longer work.
I have considered it, yes, lol. I'll do so. I've reported things in the past but I'm one of those people who feels like they're being a giant pain reporting too many things, especially something like this that I view as very low priority for most people. But hey, who knows!
Premature EDIT: oh, you're Vlad, lol. Thanks for the nudge! :D
I tried using Orion mobile for months but I just kept running into so many UI bugs that I had to switch away from it :(. I love Kagi, but Orion just feels unpolished right now
I still use it because I like how easy it is to use extensions on iOS but definitely agree that there are a lot of UI bugs. Listing the most prominent ones just in case the dev is around:
- 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 have quite the opposite view here. I have switched from Firefox to Orion on my iPhone a year ago (potentially more?) and had a great experience.
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.
Same for me. It was just so full of glitches - UI not responding, refusing to scroll, menu being inaccessible, pages somehow producing looping pop-up dialogs about not being able to render right and blocking the rest of the app...
Interesting, I get occasional glitches, mainly around placement of the text bar, but they are visual and don’t affect behavior. I’ve been living on the browser on iOS for about a year now and I enjoy it.
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.
I have been running Orion mobile on my iPhone for 3 or 4 years. Occasionally scrolling up or down would get stuck, but I haven't experienced that in a long time. I tend to do simple things though. Read HN, NYT, reddit, webtoons, and that is about it. The native ad-free experience is top.
that was my experience as well. in my case, i kept running into issues with using chrome plugins.
ditto, it’s just not stable or usable at all for me.
The best feature is being able to use Firefox extensions and thus uBlock Origin and sponsorblock on iOS. It's a little buggy but worth it for me.
You can also do that with reynard [0], and eventually firefox itself [1], if you just move to the EU or Japan.
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
Just so you know, "move to Europe" is pretty complicated inside Apple ecosystem. You can't move your App Store account from one country to another while you have any subscriptions active. You cancel them, wait for them to expire, and only then you can switch. So, for example, if you subscribed to an app yearly in January, and then cancelled your subscription in May, you still have to wait until January of next year. Very annoying in practice.
It's easier if you create a new apple ID which you use for the EU, separate from your existing one, and then login to the phone with your old Apple ID, and login to the app store specifically with the new one.
As a bonus, you can then re-buy all your apps if you want to not have to sometimes toggle between the old / new one to re-download already purchased apps.
Frankly, I'm surprised apple doesn't hard-require you to re-purchase all your apps when you switch regions, it would be a lot more apple-like.
While Apple has technically permitted third party browser engines in the EU, they have made it so onerous and expensive that no company is likely to build one. Apple remains the gatekeeper and will likely deny any builds for many years while they abuse the EU courts in delay tactics.
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
Do we have a timeline for when proper firefox will be available on iOS?
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.“
Whatever you think uBlock Origin is doing; it‘s most likely just the built-in Orion ad-blocking.
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.
I grew tired of posting the same thing every time the extension support in Orion comes up, so thank you for doing it for me
Safari has UBlock Origin by the same original Raymond Hill. I've had create success with it.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...
That's uBlock Origin Lite, not uBlock Origin. They are two very different extensions. Lite, for example, does not allow you to add custom filters.
> best feature is being able to use Firefox extensions
“The only browser supporting Safari, Chrome, and Firefox extensions.”
It isn’t really, just marketing fluff. Foxify[1] allowed Firefox to install Chrome extensions almost a decade ago and then I ported that to Waterfox after privileged extension support was removed from Firefox 56.
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
SponsorBlock has a native Safari/iOS extension that works fine.
I use 1Blocker which works very well too.
As a Firefox user, I make extensive usage of the location bar and the fact that Firefox allows you to search in history, bookmarks etc. etc.
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
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?
It was a design goal since we started working on it in 2019. (because why not?) It is basically a matter of time and devotion - we invested 7 years of development into it and while still not perfect (this is an incredibly messy problem!) a lot of people enjoy running their favorite extensions, even on iOS, which is truly unique to Orion.
I am not supporting kagi since i found out they fund putin's war via yandex that is fully owned ditrctly by state
That's fair to make as a personal choice, but full context is also important: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
Framing Russia’s unprovoked invasion of their neighbor as “politics” actually makes me less trusting of Kagi than before I read your link. It’s really not a good look.
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.
Except it is literally is just rational geopolitics. The story of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not just a single whimsical choice by a mad dictator. There has been a decades long encirclement campaign by NATO which ultimately pushed too far. That's not to say that states joining NATO did not do so willingly and of their own accord, but that it played into a larger struggle for influence that disadvantaged Russia on the world stage.
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.
So let me see if I understand your argument here.
Ukraine wanted to join NATO because it sees Russia as a threat (I dunno, maybe because Russia had just invaded Crimea and "annexed" it).
Russia's response is to invade Ukraine, slaughtering countless civilians, and has stated that it wants to take more territory around other former-soviet states.
And your reaction, to a country exercising its sovereignty, and another country invading it as a result, is "yup, that's just politics for ya"? That countries have the right to invade other countries if they feel disadvantaged by their neighbor's decisions?
No, you clearly don't understand my argument.
Ukraine didn't just disadvantage their neighbor. In international affairs, red lines are a common tool for expressing acceptable bounds of negotiation. Russia made it very explicit that if Ukraine joined NATO there would be conflict. We live in the real world, and "sovereignty" is not real; nations are not unconstrained agents that can do whatever they please. They have to weigh the effects of their actions and be willing and capable of defending the consequences. This has been true for all of human history, has never changed, and likely never will. You simply deluded yourself into thinking otherwise.
I will also add that in the modern world, peace has largely been maintained because the value of international commerce is much greater than the value derived from conflict. Economic integration is the best recipe for enduring tranquility. However, the US has pursued broad economic sanctions against Russia since the annexation of Crimea, all but ensuring that an invasion of Ukraine would be a profitable (or at least not harmful). In other words, the United States miscalculated, overplayed it's hand in pursuing a containment strategy against Russia and ultimately invited violence.
Please look up "victim blaming" and understand how it applies in this context. If Islamic terrorists say "if you depict Muhammad, we will attack you", and someone depicts Muhammad and are attacked, we don't say "wow, they really shouldn't have depicted Muhammad, this is their fault". We say "wow, those terrorists are awful." Russia's red lines were never acceptable in the first place, and their existence does not justify war crimes.
> However, the US has pursued broad economic sanctions against Russia since the annexation of Crimea
Oh those poor Russians, they can't even violently annex neighboring territory without getting sanctioned. I feel so bad for them. We should have just uttered "tsk, tsk" and kicked them out of the olympics. That'll teach 'em!
No, the "economic tranquility" was the period after the Soviet Union fell and the entire western world was welcoming Russia in with open arms, and the economic integration was well under way. Until Putin came in and decided "no, I like things the way they were" and has been trying to bring back the USSR ever since. He doesn't want any economy he can't directly control by force. You think Putin wants economic integration? He wants his soviet union back.
None of what you're talking about is "politics" unless you think Russia actually has a leg to stand on with any of this. They don't. They never have. They're the aggressor here and none of the "warnings" they gave justify any of this.
I love the example you gave because it is demonstrative of one of the most important distinctions between your moral language and the language of geopolitics. If a Muslim attacks someone in a western country, then they will have violated a law. The recipient of the violence is a victim of an infringement of rights garunteed by the government which has authority through the social contract. On the world stage, there is no higher authority, rights, or laws. What you have are a set of nations, which by definition, are agents seeking to secure prosperity for themselves. Ukraine has certain objectives to secure their prosperity like, procuring a large conventional military or nukes so that they can defend their borders. Russia also has certain objectives that secure their prosperity, like maintaining access to the black sea and building natural gas pipelines into Europe. When these nations have objectives that conflict there are only two options: compromise or war, that's it, that is the reality. In this case neither side wanted to compromise, so there was a war.
It's also important to note that this conflict is not one-sided. Ukraine has dedicedly become a proxy for US and European power projection. This is not a genocide or some other form of needless violence. This is a classic example of powers butting heads and all parties refusing to take de-escalatory actions.
> I love the example you gave because it is demonstrative of one of the most important distinctions between your moral language and the language of geopolitics. If a Muslim attacks someone in a western country, then they will have violated a law.
Lol so we can only pass judgement on something if there exists a law that it violates, and an authority that can prosecute it. If there’s no ability to prosecute something, it must be fine, just fine!
> On the world stage, there is no higher authority, rights, or laws. What you have are a set of nations, which by definition, are agents seeking to secure prosperity for themselves.
> This is a classic example of powers butting heads
I keep imagine you looking at Hitler’s actions in the 1930s and concluding “there’s no higher authority than nation states, so this is all just geopolitics, powers butting heads” and refusing to make a judgement on good vs bad.
Maybe a good checksum on your world views is “if it results in what Hitler did being fine, maybe I need to reevaluate”.
--
I'll edit this to add: You bring up "distinctions between [my] moral language and the language of geopolitics"... that's what the whole objection to Kagi's founder is about. Confusing geopolitical decision making like "what should U.S. foreign policy be, if we want to maximize the chance of peace", and moral judgements, like "is invading your neighbors to get what you want ok", is the very thing Kagi's founder is doing that I find objectionable. Because you should be able to pass a moral judgement on an action without conflating that with whether the U.S. and its allies made the right strategic moves. It doesn't matter that Russia signaled their actions in advance, it's still not ok to invade another nation. One should be able to clearly see this to be true, and not just sweep it under "it's just politics." Calling it politics is both strictly speaking true, and also a cop-out, because you get to avoid actually making a judgement about whether you think it's right. Kagi's founder did that, and you're doing that here.
This is just idiotic equivocation. The difference between Russia and Hitler is that Russia has legitimate national security concerns, for instance, not letting the world's largest military alliance (NATO) which is antogonistic to them, build defense infrastructure along their border, or choke off their ability to have a navy. The Nazis made no attempts to conceal the fact that one of their main national objectives was to invade eastern Europe and create a colonial German empire. Clearly you can see these two things are not the same, right?
If Russia's national objective is to have access to the sea, and doing so means they have to take access from another nation, then no, I don't see how the things are different, except for maybe in magnitude (Hitler just did what Putin is doing, but more. France was building defense infrastructure along its border with Germany too, if you don't recall.) It's the exact same logic though: If you excuse states for invading each other because they have "national security concerns" that involve taking what they want from other nations, the same logic excuses Hitler's actions too. Putin has also made it very clear that one of Russia's goals is to essentially reestablish the soviet union (similar to hitler's feelings about germany's humiliation after WW1), the parallels here are stark.
The US could easily say today that it has a national security concern that it needs Greenland in order to have a good defensive posture against Russia now that the north sea is becoming more navigable. Does that make it morally right to just... invade and take Greenland? I assume that is your position, because it's essentially exactly what Russia is doing. (You don't need to respond if your answer is "Yes". This thread is getting long and if your position is indeed that countries can take what they want if they have "national security concerns", we're far enough apart that there's no reason to continue debating.)
I feel like even this simplifies the issue somewhat. While we can argue for days on whether or not this war is justified in any way, anyone with any glimpse of sanity can see that this is not an appropriate reaction to any such circumstances that may have contributed to the war. That's not to mention the actions of the russian military itself
This reads like some of that covert Russian election influence they're so fond of.
Or just an American with an realist perspective on foreign affairs...
I loathe the charge that if you have any nuance and think the war is not ENTIERLY Russia's fault, then you must be brainwashed by propaganda.
No.
> 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.
Blatant gaslighting. Ukraine is defending against an invasion. Russia has said it wants to go further and take what it can of Europe, states that the Baltics aren't countries and threatens us all with nukes on a daily basis.
In Europe we defend ourselves by funding Ukraine.
It is super simple; Russia attacks when it is strong enough and takes what it can.
We tried living in peace, we believed in it. We basically got rid of our armies in Europe, since everybody knows how to live in peace. Except Russia.
We will not make that mistake again.
> everybody knows how to live in peace. Except Russia.
Talk about an extraordinary case of recency bias. Cheap shot, I know, but I had to make it.
Europe currently defends itself because that's all it CAN do. They abandoned their armies because the continent outsourced defense spending/industry to the United States and Russia following WWII.
> They abandoned their armies because the continent outsourced defense spending/industry to the United States and Russia following WWII.
We outsourced our defense spending to Russia?
Are you incapable of embarrassment over your own level of ignorance?
Are you purposely being obtuse? Eastern Europe was a protectorate of the USSR for a large portion of the last century.
> We basically got rid of our armies in Europe, since everybody knows how to live in peace.
Wrong. The UK and France have several military bases in the middle east, thousands of kilometers away from home.
The NATO invasion of Libya is an example of how Europeans "know how to live in peace"
This is so hilariously stupid, the invasion of Ukraine is so completely impossible to defend that all of these talking points smell like a third grader wrote them. In a rush, at the beginning of class.
“The moral dimension is illusory“
Yeah maybe if you glue your eyelids shut and pretend millions of dead people are actually totally fine, and definitely WORTH expending for… wait what is it that Russia has gained from this invasion?
Disgusting effort, I hope you never have control over a single ounce of power.
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No. Russia invaded Ukraine. And while it wasn't a single whimsical choice, blaming NATA wrong. This was the mad dictator, and trying to cast blame on anyone else is the same as accepting the blame yourself.
Bro watched a hot take youtube video and now is a geopolitical genius.
Unfortunately, being smart is a natural talent ;)
I really wish there was a way to support their amazing product without a cent going the way of the Russian government. I get that there is a stance being taken, and it's an attempt to be apolitical, but that's in itself a political choice.
Assuming you are using American products, with the same logic how do you support that government? I’m honestly to curious, do you find that American government historians internal external politics is that much better than Russia? What’s going on with Israel and a massive track record of human rights violations including government funded torture oriented, democracy side stepping institutions like Guantanamo bay, and many more current and previous heinous acts.
> Assuming you are using American products
Search is now Uruky, and I’ll see how that goes. https://uruky.com/
In terms of other products, I have more American ones than is ideal.
1) Yes, Russia is in fact worse than USA. This does not change that USA did and is doing evil things.
2) At least in my case Russia is directly targeting my country, while USA does not (in general, far away empires are less dangerous than nearby ones)
3) In addition Russia is more resource constrained so getting the same amount of funds benefits them more
4) USA is also doing plenty of non-evil things while for Russia this activity are much much smaller part of their spending
> 1) Yes, Russia is in fact worse than USA.
That really depends on where you live in the world. South Americans, Palestinians and Iranians would probably disagree with you.
Yes, in Russia you have less freedom, more corruption, lower quality of life, mor thuggery etc and so on.
For who is greater enemy see my point (2) and I understand that for someone directly familiar with United Fruit Company type of adventures USA may be greater enemy despite being overall less evil.
"South Americans" Nobody in my country considers going to Russia. They did in the 80's, but not since the 90's. People still go to cuba to study, but many abandon what they consider intolerable conditions, and all those I know didn't have any desire to stay after their plans.
If you meant something else, excluding Venezuela, please tell me.
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I feel it’s more a failure of regulation, it’s almost impossible to become a new search engine these days without using an existing index. There’s not many choices for that, Google won’t give you the data, Bing won’t so there’s basically only Yandex left.
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 mean, at this point Kagi could probably start their own, and there are plenty of smaller indexes (Mojeek, Yep, and Marginalia come to mind)
Or create a new partnership with various like minded organizations and create a new index that each can use in their own way (perhaps those you mention plus DuckDuckGo and others that my brain isn't bringing to mind right now [maybe Wikipedia, EFF, internet archive, maybe Nebius would help...]).
I know this wouldn't be easy but maybe such an arrangement would be possible where there is some shared index and then the partners can each use it, extend it... in their own way.
I could see a collaborative open source web index run by the WMF, Internet Archive, EFF, GNU, DuckDuckGo, and Kagi being too big to simply ignore like a previous commenter suggested might happen to a new index. I could also see Qwant being interested
Bigger search engines have a lot of custom integrations that are not just crawling the clear web. You have a lot of benefits from collecting data for a longer time in this market.
I've often switched between Google and DDG but always came back to Google as in direct comparisons I was always not finding the right results in DDG. Kagi is the first time that I have not switched back a single time as nothing changed negatively in the quality and quantity of the results.
It's a noble goal to have your own search index, but it's duplicating a lot of work that others with much more resources already do well.
In practice it is no longer actually possible to create a new search index with anywhere near the breadth of Google, regardless of the amount of resources you have available. Google (and to a lesser extant the couple of other historic engines) are entrenched enough to be allowed access by webmasters in robots.txt. And in the new era of mass abusive scraping by LLM companies, there's no longer the option to ignore robots.txt and scrape anyway, as sites do anything and everything they can to block any and all scrapers besides those already firmly entrenched.
I wish there was a way to use American products without a cent going to fund American wars, police militarization or global spying.
My thoughts exactly. And unfortunazely to be able even to access Kagi you gonna need to give US gov money in multiple places.
Putting what russia does in same sentence as what america does, shows that you are either intentionally trolling or severely handicaped.
I'm sure Iraqis, Libyans, Iranians, Palestinians, etc. agree that putting Russia in the same sentence as America is stupid.
Don't forget Japan, Vietnam, Korea, Laos and Cambodia
Why Japan? What do they have to complain about?
Someone needs a history lesson...
There is more to my comment than meets the eye. You should not assume ignorance on my part.
Guy...
Japan should be the last country with a complaint. Read up on unit 731, at least, if you are unaware of the rape of Nanking or it does not convince you.
Unit 731's work was taken over by the US and perps were let off. By the US.
By that logic, does the USA deserve to be nuked for what they did to native Americans, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq and others?
Yugoslavia.
Maybe I'm severely trolling the intentionally handicapped.
That's a valid reason to use them and very pragmatic of Kagi. Sometimes jurisdiction A wants to hide something but it's on jurisdiction B's search results. If I were a Kagi subscriber I wouldn't want my search degraded because of a vocal minority.
This is why I subscribe to Kagi. Google has been censoring topics for years, for many reasons. I have a few domains I use to test whether a search engine has been censored, and Kagi passes all of them. For example, many years ago, Google deleted the Proud Boys website from search. I believe they have deleted later iterations as well. No doubt there are millions of other website they've deleted, suppressed, or down-ranked. They're not transparent about this process or how the decisions are made. Of course I don't support or condone the Proud Boys. That is not the point. The point is that I should be allowed to search for information and make up my own mind.
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.
Regardless of whether I agree or not, that's rather level headed. I appreciate the transparent response.
What browser or search engine do you use? I’m pretty sure I can find a reason to morally oppose it for you.
Getting from using Yandex to funding Putin‘s war requires quite a few turns. Since most of Russia’s war chest is filled by money from oil exports and China indirectly also supports Russia materially, I would first cut myself off of all oil-based products, and then from the Chinese supply chain of goods, and only then cut products indluding Yandex search results. In that order, because that matters for the war chest.
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.
> send a postcard with your apology to the Kagi team
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
Why? Because the claim is that they 'fund' the war by paying Yandex.
And it remains a true claim.
Yandex divested their Russian side of the business and are Dutch.
> Yandex divested their Russian side of the business and are Dutch
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
"In July 2024, in a transaction brought about by international sanctions during the Russian invasion of Ukraine and restrictions on foreign ownership, Nebius Group, the Dutch holding company that owned Yandex, sold its Russian assets to a group of Russian investors for a discounted price of US$5.3 billion"
Fair choice but do you also boycott US companies assisting in the Gaza genocide and the unprovoked attack on Iran?
This. Just cleaned up my t-shirt shelf and need to archive the nice yellow T-shirt they sent to early adopters. Not wearing it.. (Obviously it goes for the services as well). Not happy at all.
Huh? How so? Please add some sources
The link provided by dewey - a direct source.
https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
I find it interesting that it uses GTK, something quite unusual for a proprietary app. In any case, I am not using it, because I don't want to use a nonfree WWW browser.
Surprisingly, this is what the Webkit project uses for Linux, so that's why they chose it too.
That and Webkit on unix is almost entirely worked on by GNOME people
Webkit started as a fork of KDE's KHTML and KJS. It makes good sense.
AFAIK, KHTML used Qt, not GTK. :)
I only started using it about 6 months ago so I don't know what it was like before, but today it's a solid choice. far less problematic than Chrome or Firefox or Arc or Dia or Brave or any of the other browsers I had on my system. Orion was the first browser that let me delete all the rest and haven't run into any issues in months. Some of the other comments show they hadn't used it in a long time. 1Password works perfectly as does Apple Pay.
which 1password extension works perfectly?
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.
Tried switching a while back. It's like Safari but with so many little UI improvements that make it so much more enjoyable but while still feeling like something Apple would design. Alas didn't use long as lack to many things such as no native Apple Pay support (have to use iOS or scan a code etc), or 2fa email/sms auto fill, private relay support, doesn't fully support 1Password, and so on. Most all of which because of Apple limitations but still little things that I value more than the better UI. However, far more important than all of that is so many sites didn't work. With Chrome you know a site will work, with Safari you know a lot may not, but with Orion it was an enormous number of sites that continually ran into issues and unlike Safari too many to keep reporting or find work arounds. All the benefits of Safari make it worth the downside of some sites not working properly, but the benefits of Orion over Safari for the massive number that didn't work right was certainly not worth it for me. Which was all unfortunate since the Orion team is doing everything they can essentially on their end. Hopefully they have a large enough niche to stick around and offer even modest competition for the big players.
> such as no native Apple Pay
Apple Pay is now supported [1].
[1] https://x.com/vladquant/status/1866659950921191550
I am using Orion on Mac and iOS for a few years now and I cannot disagree more.
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.
+1 - using Orion on iOS & MacOs for a few years and i like it!
Where's the source code for their browser? Such move of not publishing it is almost bizarre for such a pro-privacy company.
Kagi is not a pro privacy company except inasmuch as they currently consider privacy to be profitable.
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
> 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.
Can you provide any evidence of them having done this? As a paying Kagi subscriber, I am surely interested in knowing more.
If you click the link in my earlier comment, the author of that post goes into that including screenshots from the Kagi discord. It's the last thing before the postmortem.
> and ban you
I was wrong about the banning; I misremembered that.
Strange, I don't remember seeing the blog post link there - I must have just skipped over that. In general I found some parts provided interesting info (e.g. Kagi bought a t-shirt producer, Kagi started out as an AI company in 2018), both with links to Kagi's own blog articles; some I found a bit naive (the tax stuff, which can easily be the case and doesn't have to be a conspiracy); and some just politics between the author and the Kagi founder. In general a lot of it came down to how the author feels about Kagi, by my estimation at least.
> I was wrong about the banning; I misremembered that.
Sort of a big thing to accuse them of and then realize you just "misremembered". At a min you could edit your earlier comment to note this.
The blog post certainly has a number of unrelated gripes about Kagi. At the end, though, it's very much concretely the case that the CEO of Kagi feels that "A lot of Kagi customers care about privacy. Therefore Kagi would never do something anti-privacy, because we would lose customers".
That is to say, Kagi's stance is financial, not out of actually valuing privacy. Usually when companies are in this situation, it winds up being that they care more about appearances than reality, and will do what they think they can get away with. It's a wholly untrustworthy position for them to be in and for the CEO to present it otherwise decreases my confidence that he'll do the right thing.
> Sort of a big thing to accuse them of and then realize you just "misremembered". At a min you could edit your earlier comment to note this.
HN comments are not able to be edited (or deleted) after a somewhat brief period of time, which had already passed before I realized my error. The best I can do is correct myself in a followup comment, which is what I did.
They can give me as good a guarantee as any search engine can that they pinkie promise they aren't selling your data. What keeps me with kagi is the quality. It is night and day using it and using other search engines. Even if they sold my searches, I'd still use them in a heartbeat.
That's fair. Personally I don't find their searches to be sufficiently better than DDG that I will open my wallet.
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.
Is this the same "Kagi" that used to manage shareware license purchases (primarily for Mac) 30 years ago? I assumed it was as this Kagi also seems to be Apple-centric, but that Kagi was run by a man named Key (Key Netherly or something like that), not Vlad.
Different companies and leaders. Kagi Shareware shutdown in 2016 I think.
> WebKit.
> A web browser designed from the ground-up.
Both of these can't be true. Perhaps they're thinking of Ladybird?
WebKit is a web engine, not a browser.
WebKit is also not the ground.
Ladybird is dogshit
Ladybird is still in early development. They don't provide binaries.
I don't think it's fair to deem it "dogshit" at this point.
Can't you build (and design before that) an OS from ground up around Linux?
Well, no, to be clear! There are a lot of decisions that are made already for you when you use something else as a foundation.
WebKit is a rendering engine, not a browser. It's a bit like saying "that isn't original art because you used Earth physics that govern how paint flows and dries.
I dunno. It's more like saying "that isn't your original art because you didn't paint it, only provided the frame". A pretty elaborate frame, yes, but only the frame, not the painting.
I think this is underselling the browser UX. In many ways, Safari, Orion, Chrome, Brave, Opera, are all very different products despite all sharing the WebKit lineage.
Chrome, Brave and Opera are as much WebKit as Safari and Kagi Orion are KHTML. I wholeheartly agree on the UX part, though.
The particular choice of the marketing phrase "from the ground up" sort of invites this kind of commentary on HN. This is hardly the first WebKit-based browser, so any commenter specifically holding their breath for a new, independent rendering and layout engine or JS engine might feel inclined to roll their eyes and snark.
How dare you paint without making your own pigments!
You make your own pigments? I hope you didn't re-use already existing atoms for that
Sir, you have a license for those electrons?
Using it for years on iOS and Mac. Works great and the only zero telemetry browser. Apple Pay works and the compatibility button fixes any problem site worth loading. No complaints.
Not only. Others include LibreWolf, Waterfox, Zen, Tor, I’m sure others.
fair enough - librewolf - same as Orion: 18.29 fingerprint uniqueness - I dont know the other browsers except Tor. I use librewolf too with privacy badger and librejs - good browser
A good webkit-based browser on Windows might mean people actually start bothering to test things in that browser family.
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.
Is the source code published anywhere?
They have a github organization[0] but without explicit source code for the browser.
[0] https://github.com/OrionBrowser
I'm a heavy user of Google Drive, Docs, Sheets etc. for work. Does the suite work better with Orion now? It's the one thing that forced me off of Orion and back to Firefox. Or perhaps I need to really invest in finding a functional alternative to the Google suite. And I'm reading that Orion supports containers now, which is a feature I also love.
Was the Linux version just released or something? afaik Orion on iOS and Mac is nothing new.
it's been in beta on linux since early this year
And they have announced having funded a team for Orion on windows at the end of 2025.
https://orionfeedback.org/d/2321-orion-for-windows-android-l...
i remember seeing this thread. will be cool for windows users to have a webkit option again (are there any webkit-based browsers there since safari quit being made for it?). i will certainly be interested in trying out the android version when it comes around and have been testing out the linux version since it dropped.
GNOME Web, technically, through WSL.
haha, that is certainly one way to achieve the goal. :)
i’ve been daily-driving this on my iphone for almost 9 months now & its amazing. the built-in adblocker works wonders and fwiw, i haven’t faced that many bugs compared to what i see from other users.
this is despite having had 1k-1.3k tabs open for prolonged periods (1+ months) and being able to search/browse through them easily.
Tried Orion again two weeks ago. It's almost there for me, but the lack of history sync between devices and its battery consumption are dealbreakers for me. I love it otherwise!!!
Orion syncs history, natively though iCloud sync. Battery consumption should be on par or better than Safari (because Orion has native ad-clocking). If this isn't the case, it is unusual and worth digging deeper into.
Hey, Vlad! History did not sync between Orion on my MacBook and Orion on my iPhone. Bookmarks synced, however. I was running the latest version on all devices. Perhaps it's PEBKAC; I'll give it another go, as using Orion was an excellent experience otherwise.
It's just a webkit wrapper, not a new engine like Servo and Ladybird.
At least it's WebKit and not just a reskin of Chrome, but I don't exactly get why Kagi feel that they need to develop their own browser. Personally I prefer my search and browser to be developed be separate entities that can focus on doing one thing really well.
Yes, and you need an army of people to "wrap" WebKit just like that. E.g., the WebKit port on Haiku, of course, is not in good shape because it has more code than the whole of their OS. EFL once had a WebBrowser control/component, maintained by Tizen devs, but of course, it has now been removed. There is no manpower to maintain such control.
I switched from brave(ios) to Orion about a month ago and almost I didn't look back. Some ui bug and certain website bit playing along(reddit) but it's OK.
Unfortunately, as long as Chromium has as much market share as it does, nobody will bother to make their websites compatible with anything else.
I tried the browser, and honestly, it works very fast and is very convenient. I will give it a one week trial, and give Arc a one week break. Let's see how this develops.
I'm giving it a try after a couple months of daily driving with Zen, which I've become quite fond of. One potential deal-breaker is that it seems to be impossible to log into GitHub. After autofilling my credentials from the keychain, the form submits, and then I get redirected right back to the form with no error message. The same thing happens when I try logging in with my passkey. Has anyone else run into this and found a workaround? I tried turning off auto-submitting password forms in the Settings but that doesn't change anything.
I will suggest people to use helium browser over this closed source browser. I know kagi is good company, but i don't understand why they aren't open sourcing browser.
My main gripe with this is the pretty shocking performance on old "supported" iOS devices (e.g. an iPhone SE 2). When you have too many tabs, or watch more than a couple videos it just starts freezing and will sometimes crash the phone - you get an unresponsive sideshow screen for a bit before it goes to the lock screen with fingerprint login disabled (like after a restart). I can only assume they've accidentally found a way to make webkit leak memory?
I find it shocking that it works fine on a totally unsupported iPhone 7 (2016). With extensions! Not the latest build (unfortunately, they bumped the minimum iOS version to 17.0 recently), and I haven't stress-tested it with many tabs, but still.
Curious whether they will upstream windows support. WebKit really needs a decent rendering backend on Windows, would unlock a whole world
https://form.kagi.com/orion-windows-newsletter
Not available for BSD though one might be able to run it through the Linuxalator on FreeBSD at least.
Happy Kagi user.
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.
No password manager built-in yet. Although I suppose I really should migrate to Apple's native password manager nowadays.
I had used the built-in password managers in browsers for years when using Android. Since I switched to iPhone, I couldn’t be happier with Apple Passwords.
It’s not bad but the lack of secure notes kills it for me. Unusable without that as far as I’m concerned.
That's my issue as well.
Don't marry yourself to the Apple (or any other large vendor) ecosystem. I use Keepass variants on my Linux and Android devices, it's absolutely terrific.
Yeah. Right after typing that I was reminded how much of a nightmare trying to recover access to an Apple account is. I recently had to do it for a friend and it was nerve wracking, there was a very real chance of being permanently locked out if you take the wrong step.
Has it gotten any better in the past 6 months on Mac (UI glitches, password management)?
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).
Yeah, bitwarden just not filling fields at all is still broken
Any chance Apple Private Relay still works? That’s why I stick to Safari. Am a paying Kagi user.
That’s a feature of Safari itself.
"Zero Compromise Privacy" vs "Seamless integration with all Kagi services directly in your browser."
Search and translate (and browse?) traces from authentic humans sounds valuable.
Skip the middleman and just use Yandex browser. It has great free video dubbing feature
In the same way that I'm uncomfortable with Opera since it went Chinese and Chrome from all its corporate spyware, I'll be skipping over the Russian stuff.
Kagi is unapologetically russian, as in russian government throug yandex, connected
I really, really hope they release the source for this, if not just the code for extensions so Epiphany can finally be usable for more than basic websearch
paid $270 for a lifetime browser license and then didn't use it for a year, which honestly makes it the most authentic lifetime subscription I've ever heard of
Been looking for a browser to replace Chrome which is very difficult I know. But Chrome just gets so bloated that my M1 Macbook Air is not able to run it anymore. How good is this browser in terms of actual daily performance?
F… irefox?
You should try Firefox or Waterfox then!
also worth checking out Librewolf: https://www.librewolf.net/
Why not Safari? It works great (it is my main browser).
I use Safari all the time as well, but it doesn't behave very well with Reddit (keeps closing and reopening tabs due to "too much memory" problems. Other than that, it works for 99.9% of everything else.
Usually when sites get reloaded after sitting for a while due to “too much memory” it means the site has a memory leak (or several) that it’s owner has chosen to not address.
Annoying regardless, but arguably Safari is doing the right thing here.
Yeah, I'm sure you're right. Still irritating. I tend to use Firefox for Reddit now.
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I have just switched from Orion to Vivaldi partially as it seems to use less memory.
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.
I have hundreds of open tabs in Brave at all times on my M2 MBA and it's fine. It puts tabs to sleep when inactive and is generally quite usable. Also supports all the same extensions as Chrome (plus older ones that Chrome doesn't support).
It’s fast but it has just enough rough edges that I always go back to Firefox.
That computer, even with only 8GB RAM, should still handle Chrome well. You may have something bad installed or something misconfigured.
That was my thought. It was only released in 2020, and to great performance fanfare. To be 'not able to run it anymore' seems like it could be infested with a number of undesirables.
Brave is the best balance of privacy, security, and usability. I recommend it.
Been a big fan Brave for a while. I just recently learned about Brave Origin, the core browser with all the crypto/ads/etc removed, free for linux and one-time payment for others: https://brave.com/origin/
Yeah brave is a well rounded browser. It's the only chrome alternative imo
Great concept but buggy so not a daily option imo
I’ve used it daily almost since it was released without any real issues. But I generally do not run too many extensions or probably push the limits of my browsers.
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.
Depends on the platform, I expect. I love the feature set and layout, but it's been unusable for me as a daily driver on Linux from various bugs. I'll be giving it another honest go when it's out of beta.
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Safari has used the same WebExtensions API as Chrome and Firefox since Safari 14. So is the hard part API coverage rather than three engines?
Looks like we're back in the 1990s with everyone and their grandma making a browser
To farm that sweet data to sell to AI trainers is it?
one of their "Curated Extensions" is Tampermonkey, a non open source userscript engine. when there are multiple open ones available.
like attracts like?
People also generally use Violentmonkey (https://violentmonkey.github.io) instead nowadays.
The browser itself is nonfree. I would not be surprised with it promoting more nonfree software.
Okay...? Do you believe you're entitled to everyone's code for free?
Do you believe closed-source software is entitled to people's usage and good opinion?
Who wants to use a privacy-focused browser which isn't FOSS in this day and age, especially given the mature alternatives?
Billions of people.
Why does everyone use webkit instead of gecko? Is gecko hard to work with or something?
Is there a reason to make a gecko browser that's not a fork of Firefox?
Probably the same reason that people use webkit rather than fork chromium?
What? WebKit and Blink are very different now.
I hope it brings back ManifestV2 (or something even better). Let users switch to a cleaner Web.
Orion already supports it.
I have permanently switched to https://github.com/imputnet/helium for a while now and have been quite happy with it.
That said, I still think the browser market is garbage for consumers.
What's the unique value proposition here? I checked it out and seems like yet another Chromium fork with some privacy added on top.
It's kinda like ungoogled chromium with some defaults and opinions baked-in, the website explains better https://helium.computer/
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.
Can anyone explain how they support all 3 browsers' extensions?
7 years of stubborn development.
Very fast and good UI but the iCloud passwords integration is very poor :(
"Orion Everywhere You Are!"
Unless you are on on Android, I guess.
The Linux ARM64 appears to only be for AArch. Ubuntu has a snapdragon X Elite version.
I want to love Orion but it’s just too buggy. I went back to Safari
Yeah. I also noticed a fairly significant speed increase when I started using Safari again. Unfortunate. There are just too many features that Safari supports perfectly, that Orion either doesn't support at all, or has flakey support for. Especially the Apple ecosystem ones, which I'd think Apple doesn't expose, but Chrome seems to support some of them just fine, like 2fa codes.
We'd like to hear more about that - I've been using Orion for the last 6 years and checking Safari every month, cant say Safari ever felt faster than Orion. Must be a specific use case. So if you can be conrete in providing feedback, that would indeed be valuable.
Love Kagi the search engine, Helium is the better browser.
iCloud Bookmarks would be an easy reason to switch. SlimBrave rn works great, but I have to do workarounds via Edge to sync bookmarks to iOS Safari.
Still waiting for the Windows version.
A browser option that isn't a Chromium reskin and isn't Firefox... it does seem like a while since we've seen one of those. I've used Kagi a bit and I've been pretty impressed with how well they desloppify their results. I might have to give this a try.
So glad I stopped wasting my subscription fee on these stupid vanity projects.
Not available on Windows. DOA.
Another webkit skin pretending to be a browser.
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These people seriously need to stop.
Kagi, Rust, Claude. Just stop.
You are not innovators.