this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025
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I love Orion on iOS for its ability to use WebExtensions, but I’m not sure what benefit yet another mediocre WebKit browser would bring to the Linux space…
Extensions. Epiphany can't run Firefox and Chromium extensions, but Orion mostly can. I can't live without uBlock Origin or autofill from my password manager, and Orion is the only niche browser I know of that can.
We have to wait and see if it's really mediocre. Gnome Web certainly has performance issues, but those may be due to WebkitGTK.
Orion is not using WebkitGTK, despite using GTK and Libadwaita. Their port may not have the same performance issues.
And when I say performance issues, I don't mean benchmarks. Gnome Web actually does pretty decent on benchmarks, but things like scrolling with a mouse just don't feel smooth (but do with a trackpad).
Speaking from macOS and iOS use, Orion’s great in terms of performance and efficiency in my testing, and I’m excited to see what all can be done on Linux.
But on macOS it just uses Apple's own WebKit fork, so it is very expected: WebKit is very optimised towards Apple hardware on macOS and iOS.
I mean, I'd imagine the goal is to avoid being mediocre.
If Orion fully supports the Firefox extensions I use and is as privacy respecting as I expect, I'll likely switch to it as soon as I can. I'm sick of Firefox prioritizing features very few people want.
i don't think it's the browser for you if you care about privacy, it's not even open source
Open source =/= private. Chromium and Firefox are open source, and both have horrible privacy defaults. I have far more trust in Kagi than Mozilla or Google. There are many ways to verify privacy than other than reading the source code.
Besides, they have shared that they plan to open source the browser once the project is ready, and some components are already open source. Making a project open-source is a much bigger task than people realize. While community contributions may take some maintenance load off of your staff, they now become responsible for much more external code review, which requires more scrutiny due to coming from outside sources.
https://help.kagi.com/orion/faq/faq.html#oss
how do you verify privacy without access to the source code? open source != privacy but open source helps a ton to verify it
btw the kagi people have been saying they'll open source it at some point for ages, and in my experience those promises are usually just promises. I'll believe it when i see it
They've been open sourcing parts of it the entire time. Looks to me like they're doing what they said.
You can easily monitor network connections to see what addresses its sending packets to. You can't collect information without sending it somewhere. Run Firefox through a proxy, and you'll see it is far from private. The source code will show you what they're sending, but nothing about what they're doing with it after it's received.
O_O
OK, time to cancel plans of using kagi.