I'm also interested in new browsers. I mainly use Firefox, and have been using it since its Navigator days (although for a long period I used a derived version for OSX, Camino), and I use Chromium and Safari when I have too. A new browser is welcome for multiple reasons. But the article is very light on details, such as: what features does/doesn't Orion's engine support? It's fast, but the author doesn't even mention if Orion uses Google Safe Browsing or an alternative (which could be why Safari briefly lingers).

As it turns out, Orion is webkit based. That would explain how there can be an iOS version in the works. That seriously reduces my interest. I've signed up, because you never know, but Orion is not an undertaking comparable to Chrome, Safari or Firefox, that will add a much needed breath of fresh air/diversity to the browser landscape.

As a product manager I just want to say how impressed I am about Orion’s decision to not do any form of in-app tracking and instead to actively solicit and act on user feedback.

This kind of decision takes courage in this day and age of detailed usage analytics. I might try it out in my own projects.

> Orion supports both Chrome and Firefox extensions

Wow, this sounds amazing!

from a reddit thread: [1]

> Overall really snappy, but almost all of my Chrome extensions didn’t work properly, except for UBlock Origin which was the headlining feature on their website.

That's not good. I guess I'll download and see if my preferred extensions work with it. Other redditors didn't have issues with their extensions (though noted it was "hella buggy").

UPDATE: It does seem snappy (not much faster than Brave, if at all), but the first two extensions I tried didn't work great. Tree Style Tabs (Firefox addon) only appears on the right side of the window, and I can't find a way to move it to the left. BeeLine Reader (Chrome extension, I am the creator) runs fine, but the settings panel shows all the tabs at once, creating a very wide mess of settings.

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/r9mark/did_anyone_tr...

I’ve been using the beta for both iOS and macOS and tbh it’s just “meh”.

It’s still in beta and as such has quite a few bugs. I’ve drifted back to FF.

Although I gotta say I love Kagi search. I hope there’s a way to use the service TRULY anonymously though, because a paid service requires an auth token. If they provide a hidden service, a useful api, a cli tool, and a way to pay/use anonymously I’ll gladly pay a hefty annual/monthly subscription.

For me a browser needs to be available on all my devices. Android, iOS, Mac, windows and Linux. And it needs to sync bookmarks, history and passwords across all of those. Anything less and I go back to chrome or Firefox. Extra features just does not seem worth losing this when they are both excellent browsers already.

> Take Screenshot of the Entire Page is something I’ve wanted in a browser

Firefox natively supports this.

> Edit Text on Page is very useful to me as a translator.

`document.designMode = "on"` in the console in any browser.

I just got a new MacBook after using Windows, and am trying to do things the "Mac" way, before I attempt to customize it too much. I kinda like Safari, although it has weird bugs (e.g.: if you use tab groups, it will randomly navigate back and forth). So I like the idea of a better version of Safari. The killer feature is the support of WebExtensions (ad blocker!)

One thing that is really important to me is bookmark sync. It would be really great if you could implement Firefox sync (the source is available, I'm not sure if there are license problems in using it from a third party browser. In any case, if your extension model is powerful enough, somebody could write an open source extension to do it). This is the one feature for which I could imagine buying a pro version.

Another thing that I think would be cool is a tab filter. Press a hotkey, get a list of all tabs. Then press "hacker" and it highlights all tabs with hacker(news), and ⌘-w to close them. Or you could move all tabs with "office" to a new window. Or maybe you find a clever UI to select and close all old, not recently used tabs. This would be great to clean up all the old tabs that accumulate.

Webkit based browser for MacOS, for those wondering.

Idk if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but a browser is one of those things where I simply am not comfortable trying out options that aren't big or well known. At this point, the browser is essentially a window into my entire life, and I do things like check my bank balance on it. While Google isn't a trustworthy company by any means, I can be reasonably certain they aren't looking into what I'm doing. So trying out a new, closed source browser - even if it is as great as everyone makes it seem - is a bit too much for me.

This is a bit off topic I guess, but I don't think the goal of fixing a slow Web can be achieved by building a faster Web browser. Developers will build and test (or not test) things on their powerful Macbooks, and usually ship things that aren't noticeably slow for them, then a user with a $300 Windows laptop from Walmart will struggle to click on things. This is the nature of web dev. Increasing the speed of the browser just means web devs will accept that code is fast enough when they use it, regardless of whether or not its fast enough when a user on a less powerful machine uses it. Essentially, web pages will always expand to fill the available resources of the dev's machine and if you use their code on a less powerful computer you're out of luck.

If we want a faster web we need to get web devs to test on slower browsers and more realistic target devices.

(I can actually think of an alternative solution that browser vendors could do ... Browsers could just display a blank screen whenever a web site falls below 60fps. Websites would get a lot faster pretty quickly if Chrome did that.)

EDIT: Actually... This is possible. Chrome should display a blank screen when a website falls below 60fps when devtools is open. That would have no impact on users, but would push web developers to fix their slow pages. I'm genuinely tempted to find the time to make a PR...

I appreciate that people really need cross-platform functionality, but given that their own website says that the browser is currently in Beta, I think it’s fair to try and restrict criticism to the actual product as it currently is.

Personally, I’ve been using Kagi Search (the same company’s search engine, also in beta) for about a week, and have had a great experience.

The author says that this new browser is very similar to Safari, as if it is a good thing. Maybe it's just me, but to me Safari is a horrible, terrible, very user hostile browser that is only used once to dowload Firefox. And on mobile it is even worse. So having another browser that feels like Safari is a big instant NO in my book.

are there any web browsers out there which are created from scratch? ie not based on chromium, or webkit but every single component used in the browser was created for it?

Bonus points, if that browser is actually usable and not just a toy/academic exercise.

Direct download without waiting and signing up: https://browser.kagi.com/downloads/Orion.dmg

I would like to have a better "Find Text in Page", that darkens the page and not only highlights the found text.

I remember that once upon a time Opera did this... can we do this with Firefox or Chrome?

Here's the direct link to the browser's site: https://browser.kagi.com/

Makes claims about being faster and more leightweight than Chrome or Firefox. Looks interesting, but seems to be another MacOS and iOS exclusive app, so I won't be able to use it. It's a shame that the developer chose native over cross-platform and the FAQ doesn't mention any plans to support other platforms.

would be useful to have some images in the post

I've been trying Orion these days. It's pretty awesome although there are some rough edges. The most annoying quirk is using my Airpods Pro with Google Meet, for some reason the mic input does not always get recognized (. This behaviour also happens from time to time in Safari so this may be not an Orion issue.

Looking at the orionfeedback.org, I'd say that their most important challenge now is deciding what not to do.

I've tried it. The few bugs are expected for being so new but memory usage is the big issue for me.

If you ask me what an ideal browser in 2022 is, it would essentially be a VM hypervisor with UI made for browsing.

I would have paid for a browser that resurrected Servo or something but as much as I like Kagi from the same company, I just didn't see enough differentiator for Orion compared to say Brave.

The problem now is the web, and browsers can no longer fix it without VERY wide adoption of the fixes, and that isn't happening. So any attempts to resist result in being unable to render the web as it exists out there.

One can say browsers created the problem by letting the web get this way, but it is very hard to turn back now that we are here. It will only get worse.

just fired up Onion iOS through my own Zeek/Suricata/Snort monitoring gateway: no web browsing telemetry.

Loving it.

I just requested access earlier this week; for work, I have to use a browser that uses the host's certificate store, and am not enthused to use Chrome or Edge. Safari is OK (not a fan of the UI), but no ad blocking is the worst.

In case it saves anyone else the time I spent reading this before discovering it's for Mac only (for now): It's only available for Mac.

I noticed that iCloud is used to store the password but it is not the seamless integration with Firefox password storage. And that is ok with me.

only Firefox let you decide what exact area you want to screenshot tho (not limited to full page)

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What the world doesn't need is another webkit based browser.

It's not out and it is your main already?

The amount of manipulation and propaganda is crazy these days

Slow down!

No mention of security

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