Been using Kagi Search as my daily driver for a few months now and am really happy with the experience. Also the founder is very active within the community, responds to every message, implements a lot of suggestions. Happy to pay and hope that the project works out.
Founder here, it was quite a journey very excited to be launching beta today with payments. The idea of paying for web search was unimaginable three years ago when we started this.
Point of feedback for your consideration, I was surprised that Orion+ did not include source code. Binary-only releases seem to me an enemy of both privacy and tinkering, and represent a showstopper for the (admittedly likely quite narrow) segment of possible customers I personify. Open source is mentioned aspirationally in the FAQ; however, I don't personally need a FOSS license, just an individual right to read, modify, and rebuild for personal use, and that's something I value - as in, willing to pay for.
We are not ready (in terms of not having enough resources) to maintain an open source project, of a size of a web browser. Much bigger companies fail at running open source projects and properly engaging community, and we'd rather not try at all, than do it in a bad way. I hope this changes in the future.
Okay - but just to be clear, I'm not suggesting Orion become an open source project; I am suggesting non-free access to source code as an Orion+ subscription inclusion.
Thanks for making this Vlad! I’ve been testing it out for the last few months and it’s really coming along. As a developer who used the old Kagi.com before you bought it, I’m curious about what inspired you to pick that particular domain? Did you know Kee?
No, I did not know Kee or anyone from old Kagi.com team. They went bankrupt in unfortunate turn of events. The opportunity presented itself and I acquired the domain. I liked it because Kagi means 'key' in Japanese and at the time this idea of a 'key to the web', and replacing big-tech infrastructure for consuming the web with something "decent" was forming in my head.
Any plans to revisit the pricing? I've in the Kagi beta for months and it's way better than DDG, but it's hard to justify US$120/year when Google is free.
yup! If I do a very conservative 40 searches a day, and save 1 second on every search, that will be 20 minutes of time searching saved over a month!. I think that alone might justify the cost for some people.
Is it really hard to justify? Search is one of the things that I do most on the internet. I use it daily. Google search results are really bad for me: full of SEO spam and github/stackoverflow repeaters, or pinterest crap.
I feel it's like paying for a mattress or an office chair: the time I spend there adds up quickly. $120 a year is a freaking good deal for me.
Unfortunately the price is a function of the search cost, not our wishes. Even at $10/mo it is still unclear whether we can make it to sustainability (this is why we launched payments while still in beta, to find out).
Search cost is non-zero. It was hidden from users for 20 years, and it may come as shock, but it is real.
> Any plans to revisit the pricing? I've in the Kagi beta for months and it's way better than DDG, but it's hard to justify US$120/year when Google is free.
Everyone has different needs, but I've seen this "I hate google but not enough to spare $10 a month out of my budget" sentiment quite a lot in these comments and it really surprises me.
Folks, there are almost non-stop complaints on HN about "big tech is evil" this and "Mozilla is mismanaged" that. There are endless tirades about "big tech monopolies" and how there is an insurmountable dearth of competition in the browser space. The sheer number of comments I've read where people attack Apple because anything that isn't Safari is more or less a second class citizen on their platforms, where people cry out for more options, for even a single ever-loving service that isn't driven by ad revenue, and about how freeloaders who expect unlimited free tiers are the bane of humanity is bonkers.
I mean, HN has tens of thousands of comments bemoaning these things.
Any of you who're reading this and haven't tried it out yet, give the beta a shot and then ask yourselves: is watching and experiencing the continual decline of free services from huge companies (companies that may as well be monopolies and duopolies) worth saving $170 a year (kagi and Orion+)? Or would you rather support a worthy cause with some real potential?
One of the most oft-repeated sayings I see here is "vote with your wallet" and now's the time to do it.
What makes processing searches so expensive? I see elsewhere in this forum that it’s $1/80 searches. I’m just curious what part of your infra is costing you so much.
Great question! Mostly paid APIs we use (probably 80%), rest is infrastructure.
But I will counter with this. It costs $0.0125 to run a web search over the entire web, producing meaningful, relevant and rich results, and all that in less than 500ms, any time of day, from anywhere. That is 1.25 cents to do all of the above. And the value you can get from that one search can often be 1,000,000x more.
That has to be one of the best deals in the universe.
(and mind you, with other search engines that cost is still there, it is only paid by their customers - the advertisers)
I suspect that your estimate of google search infrastructure costs may be high by 1-2 orders of magnitude. Have you considered what the cost would be if the external APIs were in-housed? As an early-stage startup, you likewise are paying extra for compute, and expedient but often inefficient systems.
Is there a path to a <$5/mo unlimited plan? IIRC Google made less than $10 per year per user up until the mid 2010s.
You are probably right if we disregard the 20 years of cap-ex investments Google made into having that infrastructure. In order to in-house this we would probably need to own $500M-$1B worth of infrastructure at the very least (web is vast). Yes then the cost per search would be lower.
Maybe it will sound strange, but I do not think of our goal as optimizing for growth and number of users. It is to optimize for sustainability and quality of product. Often these two incentives are opposite of one another. I see us as a small, boutique, premium search brand. I'd rather have us gain more users by improving the quality than by lowering the price.
This strategy of not focusing on growth is key to my interests. For example, I’ve been a customer of Fastmail since they launched maybe 20 years ago. And I’ve got my family and many colleagues using Fastmail. It is a paid email service.
Could I use any of the “free” email services like GMail (or back in the day, Yahoo)? Of course. But Fastmail does one thing and they do it well, and I don’t have to worry about them analyzing my emails and selling ads to me. I am willing to pay for that.
Please stay focused. I just tried Kagi today and I’m incredibly surprised at how fantastic the search results are. I never thought I would pay for a search engine but here I am.
Assuming you experience good growth in your business, is there room for you to reduce your dependency on external API's, while maintaining the good quality search results you seem to be generating?
And to add to what others have been saying, I've been finding your results to be quite high quality, absolutely better than DDG and probably better than Google for me too. I subscribed immediately. The only thing I'm missing is I'm still getting slow result times from Australia. Just now, for a test search:
Connected to: ASIA-SOUTHEAST Network latency: 501ms
There is already an iOS/iPadOS version. Elsewhere, I have read that the developers would like to make a Linux version, but that they currently don’t have the manpower to do so.
I envision Linux next. Windows would be tricky as WebKit is not really up to date on Windows. So we would probably have to resort to a differnt rendering engine. We are long way from this though, that kind of project would probably take 20 people extra.
I just want to say thank you, I think I’ve only opted to use Google a handful of times since I started using Kagi for work (software eng).
I always thought that JetBrains IDEs were the only products that raised my professional productivity so much that they were worth paying for, but now Kagi will join that club.
I've been using Kagi for a while now(maybe 2-3 months iirc), and it's been a great experience. I've hopped between 4[0] search engines in the past year, and I've finally found one that works really well, is private, and does what I need it to do. My thanks to the Kagi team for delivering a great experience, I've enabled my premium account. 100% worth it for me.
I've been evaluating Kagi for a couple weeks, I'm liking it, but today I'm completely sold. I've been doing a niche, technical search this morning: trying to figure out if Emacs and TRAMP can be made to work with flatpak-spawn.
Google returned a ton of unrelated posts and I had to tell it to stop ignoring my search terms. Kagi returned the only relevant page: a comment on a Github issue that Google wasn't able to find, and no other fluff, because that particular combination of words doesn't exist anywhere else on the Internet.
In other words, Google lies and paraphrases your search to return as much results as possible, usually not very relevant, while Kagi respects my search terms and can surface very niche pages. 2022 Google makes the Internet feel very small.
I've test driven Brave Search for months as well, and this is my personal ranking, from best to worst: Kagi > Brave Search = Google Search > DDG.
I like the UX, but the results are full of content farms and weird ranking for the query "golang parser" (https://you.com/search?q=golang+parser). OTOH it is much faster than kagi.
First result is good:
pkg.go.dev/go/parser
Second result looks like a content farm:
golangdocs.com/golang-parser-package
Third result looks like a valid Chinese search result, but it's a duplicate of the first result and also _very_ weird that it would rank that highly:
golang.cm/pkg/go_parser.htm
Then the next two results are content farms:
golangexample.com/tag/parser/
golangexample.com/a-dead-simple-parser-package-for-go/
Then a valid result from a low-starred GH project:
github.com/prataprc/goparsec
Then a good result:
blog.gopheracademy.com/advent-2014/parsers-lexers/
Then a random seemingly unrelated academic paper:
www.arxiv.org/abs/1505.08075
Then a valid result from a high-starred GH project:
github.com/alecthomas/participle
Then another content farm:
awesomeopensource.com/projects/golang/parser
kagi also has a bunch of the content farms, but the ranking is better IMO. Good luck!
Been using on iOS for a few months now. I enjoy using Orion because it actually gives the user options and imo fixes the issues I had with the Safari redesign. Love that it’s fast and intuitive.
One thing I don’t like is that there’s no option to never save history (like the DDG app)
Awesome, I've been using kagi for a couple months now, and it's been awesome! I love thee ability to open internet archive quickly or bump the ranking of certain sites.
I am still a little confused about the pricing situation though. As I understand you guys plan to offer "free with limited usage" and a paid 10$/month unlimited use plan. But I can't seem to find any information on what the "limits" are? I do not have any insights on how much running a search engine costs, but 10$ a month seems quite high for most users. I really like the flat pricing model though.
Another issue I feel like that largely goes unnoticed is, privacy in incognito mode, if I use kagi in incognito, all my searches are associated with my "account", even worse for some people their payment information!, which is something I'm just not comfortable with.
EDIT:
So I thought about it a little, and I'd say 10$ a month is probably worth it (to me)! Just for the features and search result quality. Considering how much of a value a search engine has in my life. I was initially skeptical if it would cost them THAT much. But I see it from a different perspective now.
I would still not use Kagi for private searches though, and that's just me. Privacy is something I would rather trust someone without my full name with, that just my opinion though.
As for the incognito side I'm not convinced it's any less connected than switching to Incognito and searching with your normal search provider. Yeah, the sign in info is explicitly sent but it's not like Google et al don't know it's you just because you didn't send the sign in info. If you're worried about that threat vector (your search engine tracking you when they say they won't) I'd use a different than your normal search engine through something like TOR.
gosh 1$/80 searches is somewhat expensive... are these pure infrastructure costs or does this include development costs which I hope would scale down as the search engine grows?
They use a lot of 3rd party APIs rather than try to beat everyone at quality and the only monetization is via direct payment so those 3rd party API costs get baked in. For an idea how many things a search might call
https://kagi.com/faq#:~:text=Where%20are%20your%20results%20...
> Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well as vertical sources like Wikipedia and DeepL or other APIs. We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers.
...
And of course, we answer quick queries like “How far is the sun from the earth?” or “10kg in lbs” with our instant-answer systems that use dozens of sources and APIs, all connected to you quickly yet transparently.
Cost of their infrastructure to tie it together and development/maintenance may go down with scale but it's not really expected to get significantly cheaper to provide the search results without either lowering quality or using alternative monetization, both of which Kagi is against. I'm not associated with Kagi I just happened to ask very similar questions a few days ago in their Discord.
It is interesting though because I share the same thought where something physically tangible like a gym membership can be quadruple the price of monthly subscribed software but the other way round and I’m surprised.
Ha, I was trying to debate the cost of paying 10$ a month for a subscription like this, and this might have changed the way I look at it. As a developer I wasn't thinking about "how much I am willing to pay for it and how much use I get out of it", I was thinking from a "how much does it cost Kagi" perspective.
I do not care much about ads or privacy from Kagi (I use adblock + I won't use kagi for private searches). But I think the features just make it worth it.
I agree that I think the cost may be worth it. I am a little disappointed that they want to link private searches to an account (which I think they’ll eventually change based on the user feedback they’ll receive).
True, I wish they gave a discount when paying for an year. BUT! with the quality of their search results I am still going to pay for it. I used ddg to get away from google and I often found myself doing g! everytime.
With kagi, I almost never have to go back to google. Its really good for programming related searches as well. One of my favourite features about them is I can block certain sites from appearing on my search results and see more of certain sites.
My take has been that I pay more than that for almost every other subscription (Netflix, Spotify, etc.) and yet Kagi is the only one that I'm almost guaranteed to use every single day and it's got the biggest influence on my productivity. The others I'm more likely to just passively consume. With Netflix increasingly being more hit and miss as to whether it's even an enjoyable experience.
What makes it interest enough to worth $10 while I can do multiple searches across engines? Privacy is something that I value, but $10 is a significant amount that's above most of popular privacy services pricing (usually around $5).
I agree. I dislike the tendency in Apple circles to just simply imply that things only run on mac. It’s like: I know it’s obvious to you, the software author, but it’s not obvious to me, the reader. Even though I use mac sometimes, I mostly don’t use software that isn’t cross platform.
Yeah, and that’s annoying, but at least it makes sense, being quite a majority share of the desktop and laptop market. And I can run it on Wine if I want, which gives me a better prognosis than any Apple software does on other platforms…
I wish it was open source, which would help your concern as well as "what secret stuff does this thing exfiltrate?" Hell, I'd settle for just "source available," given the company
I was going to say that unfortunately Vimium, Dark Reader, and 1Password support are non-negotiable, but the browser evidently has its own built-in dark mode, and they claim to support both Chrome and Firefox extensions as well?
I'm happy to provide non-Chromium traffic from either Firefox or something else; I'm increasingly running into things (often corporatey things) that only work in Chrome.
It also sounds like they use your icloud for syncing things like bookmarks and sharing tabs and use the built-in password manager, so if you're Apple-only this is a great fit. I hope the tab sharing will be more reliable than Firefox's has been.
Waiting until I can brew install, but looks promising.
Unfortunately 1Password doesn't work. Not because of extension compatibility but seemingly because 1Password has an internal whitelist of trusted browsers that Orion is not included in. It's really unfortunate as there's been a community forum post about it for months[1], but it's never been addressed.
Dark Reader has worked perfectly fine for me though.
At least with 1P8 (and I can only speak to the Linux version), they have an opt-in file located in /etc/1password/custom_allowed_browsers (https://1password.community/discussion/comment/641837/#Comme...) although one will want to exercise caution about the ownership of the actual binary, as one can see in that thread
I haven't needed to try that on macOS but it may be worth a shot, given the shared Electron codebase
Then be sure to check that 1Password_rCURRENT.log mentioned in the thread, as it may provide at least more debugging info about why they're angry; that's how I found out how to fix my Firefox install (albeit not on macOS)
Been using Kagi for a while now after using every search engine under the sun, and I've enjoyed it thus far. I don't mind paying for good software so I'll probably pay for premium when i burn through the free usage.
If you compare the current vs dev versions on https://caniuse.com/ you can see that Safari is catching up. Besides, I consider Chrome the modern IE because it keeps trying to subvert standards to hold on to its monopoly.
I understand how that may feel. Orion founder here. Here was the thought process behind the choice.
When you decide to build a browser you first need to decide the browser engine.
We decided we don't want Chromium (because who needs another Chromium browser) so that left Gecko and WebKit.
Since I happen to personally use macOS and thought it had wonderful future as a consumer OS (this is all happening in 2018) I decided we should go with macOS and picked WebKit because it is native on macOS while Gecko isn't. It is all the fastest web rendering engine, with the best energy consumption and very robust privacy practices. All good base for a fast, zero telemetry browser.
Also Safari left a lot to be desired (my previous browser of choice) so since we are building a browser from scratch, why not build something that works great on Macs/iPhones first and then we will think about other platforms when we get there.
It's refreshing to see more stuff using WebKit and not Blink / Chromium! Will definitely give this a go
/EDIT: this looks, feels and acts exactly like Safari. Feels like I'm just using Safari with a little bit of extra on the top, is that what this is or is everything re-implemented to look like Safari?
Also sad to see Safari extensions not supported. It's super cool to have chrome/firefox extension support, but Safari has some really nice things as well
> Why use Orion instead of Safari?
> Safari is truly one of the best browsers you can use on macOS, and we’re grateful to Apple for creating such a solid foundation. By basing Orion on Safari’s tech stack, then adding productivity enhancements such as built-in ad-blocking, Orion can provide users with exactly what they need.
> You want speed? Orion is currently the fastest Mac browser out there. We built a snappy, lightweight browser around Safari’s WebKit engine to accelerate your web experience.
> Orion is fast
> What about privacy? Orion is a true zero-telemetry browser, with a powerful built-in ad and tracking blocker. Even with its default settings, Orion offers the highest possible privacy protection on the web.
> And extensions! Unlike Safari, Orion has native support for both Chrome and Firefox extensions. This gives our users access to the largest extensions ecosystem in the world. With Orion, you can one-click install your favorite extensions directly from the web.
/EDIT2: Extension support is still a bit wonky. Sometimes the chrome version works, sometimes it doesn't and I have to use the Firefox variant, sometimes neither work
> /EDIT2: Extension support is still a bit wonky. Sometimes the chrome version works, sometimes it doesn't and I have to use the Firefox variant, sometimes neither work
then I wish Orion has an updated compatible extension list
Can someone explain what the Intelligent Tracking Prevention feature is designed to guard against? Will it be limited to cross-site tracking, or does it also prevent individual websites from fingerprinting you through stuff like WebGL/WebUSB?
Non-Chromium browsers are protected from fingerprinting by stuff like WebUSB by the nature that none of them support WebUSB. Many of these supposed "Web" things are actually just Chrome-proprietary features.
I assume they're fine with never being able to have this on the App Store, since that seemingly goes against their rules, considering the trouble apps like iSH had to go through?
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] threadAMA!
We are not ready (in terms of not having enough resources) to maintain an open source project, of a size of a web browser. Much bigger companies fail at running open source projects and properly engaging community, and we'd rather not try at all, than do it in a bad way. I hope this changes in the future.
No, I did not know Kee or anyone from old Kagi.com team. They went bankrupt in unfortunate turn of events. The opportunity presented itself and I acquired the domain. I liked it because Kagi means 'key' in Japanese and at the time this idea of a 'key to the web', and replacing big-tech infrastructure for consuming the web with something "decent" was forming in my head.
spending time scrolling to try and find where the ad results end and my organic results begin is one thing that feels very un-free
If it really costs them $1 for 80 searches, I don't see how they can bring it much lower. $10 feels like the sweet spot for me.
I feel it's like paying for a mattress or an office chair: the time I spend there adds up quickly. $120 a year is a freaking good deal for me.
My marginal resources aren't dollars, they are time & energy.
Search cost is non-zero. It was hidden from users for 20 years, and it may come as shock, but it is real.
Everyone has different needs, but I've seen this "I hate google but not enough to spare $10 a month out of my budget" sentiment quite a lot in these comments and it really surprises me.
Folks, there are almost non-stop complaints on HN about "big tech is evil" this and "Mozilla is mismanaged" that. There are endless tirades about "big tech monopolies" and how there is an insurmountable dearth of competition in the browser space. The sheer number of comments I've read where people attack Apple because anything that isn't Safari is more or less a second class citizen on their platforms, where people cry out for more options, for even a single ever-loving service that isn't driven by ad revenue, and about how freeloaders who expect unlimited free tiers are the bane of humanity is bonkers.
I mean, HN has tens of thousands of comments bemoaning these things.
Any of you who're reading this and haven't tried it out yet, give the beta a shot and then ask yourselves: is watching and experiencing the continual decline of free services from huge companies (companies that may as well be monopolies and duopolies) worth saving $170 a year (kagi and Orion+)? Or would you rather support a worthy cause with some real potential?
One of the most oft-repeated sayings I see here is "vote with your wallet" and now's the time to do it.
But I will counter with this. It costs $0.0125 to run a web search over the entire web, producing meaningful, relevant and rich results, and all that in less than 500ms, any time of day, from anywhere. That is 1.25 cents to do all of the above. And the value you can get from that one search can often be 1,000,000x more.
That has to be one of the best deals in the universe.
(and mind you, with other search engines that cost is still there, it is only paid by their customers - the advertisers)
Is there a path to a <$5/mo unlimited plan? IIRC Google made less than $10 per year per user up until the mid 2010s.
Maybe it will sound strange, but I do not think of our goal as optimizing for growth and number of users. It is to optimize for sustainability and quality of product. Often these two incentives are opposite of one another. I see us as a small, boutique, premium search brand. I'd rather have us gain more users by improving the quality than by lowering the price.
Could I use any of the “free” email services like GMail (or back in the day, Yahoo)? Of course. But Fastmail does one thing and they do it well, and I don’t have to worry about them analyzing my emails and selling ads to me. I am willing to pay for that.
Please stay focused. I just tried Kagi today and I’m incredibly surprised at how fantastic the search results are. I never thought I would pay for a search engine but here I am.
And to add to what others have been saying, I've been finding your results to be quite high quality, absolutely better than DDG and probably better than Google for me too. I subscribed immediately. The only thing I'm missing is I'm still getting slow result times from Australia. Just now, for a test search:
Connected to: ASIA-SOUTHEAST Network latency: 501ms
Recording a side by side video of DuckDuckGo results and Kagi results with network tab in browser open would be great, if you can.
I always thought that JetBrains IDEs were the only products that raised my professional productivity so much that they were worth paying for, but now Kagi will join that club.
So, i'm hoping for an alternative/smaller payment option where i can pay based on actual consumption as shown on https://kagi.com/pricing
I have been using Kagi for a few months, and i would definitely recommend it, it has great potential!
[0]: Ecosia -> DDG -> Brave Search -> Kagi
Good luck with the public beta! Love Kagi.
Google returned a ton of unrelated posts and I had to tell it to stop ignoring my search terms. Kagi returned the only relevant page: a comment on a Github issue that Google wasn't able to find, and no other fluff, because that particular combination of words doesn't exist anywhere else on the Internet.
In other words, Google lies and paraphrases your search to return as much results as possible, usually not very relevant, while Kagi respects my search terms and can surface very niche pages. 2022 Google makes the Internet feel very small.
I've test driven Brave Search for months as well, and this is my personal ranking, from best to worst: Kagi > Brave Search = Google Search > DDG.
looks very strong too. github issue is the top results also. would love to hear what you think. we're focused especially on developers.
First result is good: pkg.go.dev/go/parser
Second result looks like a content farm: golangdocs.com/golang-parser-package
Third result looks like a valid Chinese search result, but it's a duplicate of the first result and also _very_ weird that it would rank that highly: golang.cm/pkg/go_parser.htm
Then the next two results are content farms: golangexample.com/tag/parser/ golangexample.com/a-dead-simple-parser-package-for-go/
Then a valid result from a low-starred GH project: github.com/prataprc/goparsec
Then a good result: blog.gopheracademy.com/advent-2014/parsers-lexers/
Then a random seemingly unrelated academic paper: www.arxiv.org/abs/1505.08075
Then a valid result from a high-starred GH project: github.com/alecthomas/participle
Then another content farm: awesomeopensource.com/projects/golang/parser
kagi also has a bunch of the content farms, but the ranking is better IMO. Good luck!
One thing I don’t like is that there’s no option to never save history (like the DDG app)
Any chance that could be added soon?
Another issue I feel like that largely goes unnoticed is, privacy in incognito mode, if I use kagi in incognito, all my searches are associated with my "account", even worse for some people their payment information!, which is something I'm just not comfortable with.
EDIT:
So I thought about it a little, and I'd say 10$ a month is probably worth it (to me)! Just for the features and search result quality. Considering how much of a value a search engine has in my life. I was initially skeptical if it would cost them THAT much. But I see it from a different perspective now.
I would still not use Kagi for private searches though, and that's just me. Privacy is something I would rather trust someone without my full name with, that just my opinion though.
As for the incognito side I'm not convinced it's any less connected than switching to Incognito and searching with your normal search provider. Yeah, the sign in info is explicitly sent but it's not like Google et al don't know it's you just because you didn't send the sign in info. If you're worried about that threat vector (your search engine tracking you when they say they won't) I'd use a different than your normal search engine through something like TOR.
> Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well as vertical sources like Wikipedia and DeepL or other APIs. We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers. ... And of course, we answer quick queries like “How far is the sun from the earth?” or “10kg in lbs” with our instant-answer systems that use dozens of sources and APIs, all connected to you quickly yet transparently.
Cost of their infrastructure to tie it together and development/maintenance may go down with scale but it's not really expected to get significantly cheaper to provide the search results without either lowering quality or using alternative monetization, both of which Kagi is against. I'm not associated with Kagi I just happened to ask very similar questions a few days ago in their Discord.
edit: just paid, it came to about $15AUD after bank conversion fees which is about the price of a streaming service here.
Still, it's a great product.
I do not care much about ads or privacy from Kagi (I use adblock + I won't use kagi for private searches). But I think the features just make it worth it.
With kagi, I almost never have to go back to google. Its really good for programming related searches as well. One of my favourite features about them is I can block certain sites from appearing on my search results and see more of certain sites.
> Orion is an alternative browser for Apple users
https://browser.kagi.com/faq.html#goal
I'm happy to provide non-Chromium traffic from either Firefox or something else; I'm increasingly running into things (often corporatey things) that only work in Chrome.
It also sounds like they use your icloud for syncing things like bookmarks and sharing tabs and use the built-in password manager, so if you're Apple-only this is a great fit. I hope the tab sharing will be more reliable than Firefox's has been.
Waiting until I can brew install, but looks promising.
Orion warns that the support for web extensions is experimental. But this so far I love the idea of this browser.
Dark Reader has worked perfectly fine for me though.
[1] https://1password.community/discussion/124112/support-for-or...
I haven't needed to try that on macOS but it may be worth a shot, given the shared Electron codebase
When you decide to build a browser you first need to decide the browser engine.
We decided we don't want Chromium (because who needs another Chromium browser) so that left Gecko and WebKit.
Since I happen to personally use macOS and thought it had wonderful future as a consumer OS (this is all happening in 2018) I decided we should go with macOS and picked WebKit because it is native on macOS while Gecko isn't. It is all the fastest web rendering engine, with the best energy consumption and very robust privacy practices. All good base for a fast, zero telemetry browser.
Also Safari left a lot to be desired (my previous browser of choice) so since we are building a browser from scratch, why not build something that works great on Macs/iPhones first and then we will think about other platforms when we get there.
That is pretty uch the whole story.
From an ethical/ideological pov, I really quite agree with you. I use Firefox :P More power to an alternative to the Chromium monopoly.
Thanks for the reply. I am looking forward to trying the beta.
/EDIT: this looks, feels and acts exactly like Safari. Feels like I'm just using Safari with a little bit of extra on the top, is that what this is or is everything re-implemented to look like Safari?
Also sad to see Safari extensions not supported. It's super cool to have chrome/firefox extension support, but Safari has some really nice things as well
> Why use Orion instead of Safari?
> Safari is truly one of the best browsers you can use on macOS, and we’re grateful to Apple for creating such a solid foundation. By basing Orion on Safari’s tech stack, then adding productivity enhancements such as built-in ad-blocking, Orion can provide users with exactly what they need.
> You want speed? Orion is currently the fastest Mac browser out there. We built a snappy, lightweight browser around Safari’s WebKit engine to accelerate your web experience.
> Orion is fast
> What about privacy? Orion is a true zero-telemetry browser, with a powerful built-in ad and tracking blocker. Even with its default settings, Orion offers the highest possible privacy protection on the web.
> And extensions! Unlike Safari, Orion has native support for both Chrome and Firefox extensions. This gives our users access to the largest extensions ecosystem in the world. With Orion, you can one-click install your favorite extensions directly from the web.
/EDIT2: Extension support is still a bit wonky. Sometimes the chrome version works, sometimes it doesn't and I have to use the Firefox variant, sometimes neither work
Looks very promising though
then I wish Orion has an updated compatible extension list
Can someone explain what the Intelligent Tracking Prevention feature is designed to guard against? Will it be limited to cross-site tracking, or does it also prevent individual websites from fingerprinting you through stuff like WebGL/WebUSB?
It's a nice upgrade from safari.
I may be completely wrong though. In that case, are those other webkit projects able to run on linux/windows? And How hard would it be to port Orion?