Orion 1.0
42 points by bezdomni
42 points by bezdomni
A bold technical choice: WebKit, not another Chromium clone
This is hilarious to me. I realize Blink is distinct now and has been for a while, etc etc, but in my mind they’re still just different versions of the same thing.
It’s also interesting how almost the entire world browses the web with KDE software using the text encoding from Plan 9.
Most people switch browsers for one reason: speed.
Is that so? Is this the demographic Orion is aimed toward? Browser performance hasn't been on my radar in years. What I care about is having control over my experience and privacy.
Anyway, in that case they are in a very bad position, I've tried using Orion for a couple of months before starting my own webkit based browser. And it was, so, slow. It really chokes on some pages.
No download or source link? Or is this a teaser page? You should put some way to notify people when they can try this. I'd be interested.
It's a teaser page, It's not ready for consumption yet. I'll think about adding a waitlist or something
I was using Orion for a while, but it was really, really buggy. Maybe its gotten better in the last few months, but it was rough for the year or so I used it. I do like that there is a macOS native browser with sidebar tabs though
Yeah, I use it for adblocking and Kagi integration, but… I was shocked to see 1.0, today. Its tab handling especially is reliably unreliable on iOS, for me. I have muscle memory routines for working around how regularly it just loses newly-opened tabs!
And pages crash to a white screen that requires restarting the browser quite often on iOS and macOS. I found a repeatable one on macOS yesterday, actually, just installing the 1Password addon.
That was my experience when I gave up on it about a year ago. I really wanted to like it. There were two main things that pushed me away, apart from the sort of instability that you might expect from beta software:
It had weird rendering behaviors that were disruptive and that I couldn't replicate in either Safari or Firefox. I suspect they were down to poorly made sites.
Bitwarden integration didn't work very well with either the Chrome or the Firefox version of their webextension. That made it hard for me to use.
I'm rooting for them to make a successful browser. But if I'm going to have to troubleshoot my daily driver browser, I need it to have source available. I'll probably try it again once people seem to be saying good things about stability and correctness, because it was nice to use when it worked.
Yeah, I use it because WebKit+uBlock Origin and the fact switching is effort, but I deal with cases where performance degrades (this includes WebExtensions breaking down), tab handling gets extremely busted (blank pages on window switch, tabs getting stuck, etc.), focus problems (window is in front but pretends it's not in focus), etc. It's hard to recommend on top of the Kagi leadership not being very accepting of criticism. Now that Safari has uBlock Origin, I'd probably just use that.
Now that Safari has uBlock Origin, I'd probably just use that.
Note that uBlock Origin Lite is using their own JS blocking engine instead of Safari’s built in one, which means less performance, both for load times and battery use. I’d recommend wBlock instead, which is built on the native tools and has an additional extension for ads which couldn’t be filtered otherwise, and user scripts.
Focus Mode: Instantly transform any website into a distraction‑free web app. Perfect for documentation, writing, or web apps you run all day.
Are they advertising.... a fullscreen mode?
More like windowed fullscreen, the website uses the entire window, with no borders or UI, so you can “focus” on the site.
I wish them luck, but WebKit seems like a poor choice, and 2 of their stated reasons for picking it don't make sense to me.
A high‑performance engine that is deeply optimized for macOS and iOS.
Kagi Search isn't OS-specific, so why emphasize this point? Do their customers overwhelmingly use Apple?
A foundation that is not controlled by an advertising giant.
I assume this is a dig at Mozilla and Google, but Webkit's partly funded by ads, too. Apple gets the same payout for search as Mozilla does, and they've been building their own ad division for a while now.
"less controlled", maybe.
Anyone know if it has Widevine DRM support?
My only gripe with Zen browser has been the lack of the ability to play DRM protected videos on various platforms such as Netflix.
I use Orion happily on iOS - The adblocking is superior to anything else I've tried so far - but I won't be giving up on QuteBrowser anytime soon on PC.