I've been loving Kagi search and am really looking forward to Orion being available outside Apple land. You can join the email list here: https://kagi.com/changelog#6479
I'm a bit worried that Kagi might be over-extending here. Instead of focusing and capitalizing on search, they're expanding to the difficult business of browsers. I'm always hesitant when companies try to do everything everywhere all at once, since that might cause a loosening of focus on the original product.
I hope them all the best nonetheless - people actually paying for software is due a comeback!
Trying to use Kagi with other browsers lays bare the depth of collusion between browser makers and search providers. Getting out from under all that makes Kagi a whole lot more seamless and useful.
It’s ironic that it is its own tight collusion, with the difference that you can use Orion just as well with any other search providers as with Kagi.
So yeah, it seems like a departure from search, until you consider that for the features that make Kagi a worthwhile search product (privacy, neutrality, etc), “you can’t get there from here” with the other browsers.
This is something I don't understand. Kagi has been my only search engine since they dropped the price to $10/mo. I've only ever used Kagi with Firefox, and I use it on Linux, Windows, and Mac. I just add it to my search engines and set it as default, which takes about 15 seconds.
Everything seems to just work seamlessly. Searching in private windows works without any configuration or token juggling.
I have never tried the Orion browser or the extension because I don't understand the problem that they allegedly solve.
To set it as your default search engine on iOS, you need to first install a separate Kagi Search app from the App Store, enable the extension, and then dig through some fairly obscure Safari settings so that the Kagi app can run with enough permissions to intercept/redirect search URLs for other search engines.
So now when I search in Safari, the browser says “DuckDuckGo Search” but when I hit return Kagi jumps in. I also had to turn off search suggestions because those (as far as I know) would still come from DDG.
This seems more like an indictment of iOS than collusion between search and browser vendors. I'm using Kagi as my default search on Android, Linux, Mac, and Windows, both Chrome and Firefox. The kind of nonsense your describing us why iOS doesn't show up in my list of devices.
My point was more that you claimed to not understand and I was just providing an example where it does take longer than “15 seconds” to switch to Kagi.
iOS/iPhone has the majority mobile market share in many countries including the United States. If you’re unaware, Google is currently being sued by the US government for establishing a monopoly over search engine placement including payments to Apple and Mozilla to keep Google as the default search engine. So, with that context, can you honestly say there’s no collusion between search providers and browser vendors?
Google pays to be the default. AFAIK they don't pay to make the switching experience maliciously difficult. After all, the switching experience on Android is dead simple. That seems to be another unilateral decision by Apple to keep you in your lane.
> My point was more that you claimed to not understand and I was just providing an example where it does take longer than “15 seconds” to switch to Kagi.
It's an example, but it's not an example that proves the point.
> iOS/iPhone has the majority mobile market share in many countries including the United States. If you’re unaware, Google is currently being sued by the US government for establishing a monopoly over search engine placement including payments to Apple and Mozilla to keep Google as the default search engine. So, with that context, can you honestly say there’s no collusion between search providers and browser vendors?
Yes, easily.
The comment was talking about depth of collusion in making it significantly not seamless. But even with Google pushing a default, it's a trivial switch on Android.
On top of that, Google pushing their search engine onto Android phones has nothing to do with "browser vendors". It's a different topic.
So I say Android is not an example, and desktop is fine, leaving the only example of problems as Apple. Even if I think that's collusion, just Apple doing a thing is not collusion over the general market of browser makers. But I'm also skeptical that it's collusion. Apple always offers limited choices and bad customizability.
I find it hard to believe that Google just happens to be the default search engine everywhere. And that the best user experience for Apple’s users is to have a search engine list that you have to pay to be on. And that if you change your default search engine or browser newtab half the browsers out there will nag you to switch it back for “security”. And if you visit the internet’s home page on anything other than Chrome you get bombarded with popups compelling you to install Chrome.
If you’re not aware of the “collusion” you might just be asleep at the wheel. You may be right semantically, though: it might not really be collusion—it’s simply light of day bribery.
> I find it hard to believe that Google just happens to be the default search engine everywhere.
I didn't say there wasn't collusion of any kind. I said Google being the default on android is not collusion with browser vendors.
And on Windows, Bing is the default.
> And if you visit the internet’s home page on anything other than Chrome you get bombarded with popups compelling you to install Chrome.
Self-promotion is not collusion.
Also critical to my point is that collusion to set a mere default is not what the original comment was talking about. You don't need to switch your browser to "lay bare the depth" of a default. They were talking about something much stronger.
The point is there are non-trivial examples where it’s really hard to switch your default search engine away from Google/Bing because all paths lead back to them (via platform self-promotion and paid placement). One might even argue that the dominant search engine owning the dominant user-agent is implicitly illegal (and thus I guess collusive, but I digress). I don’t really know what we’re arguing anymore. I think everyone knows that it’s not universally easy to switch your search engine. The fact that there are good examples like Android does not invalidate the bad examples like *OS and Windows. It’s difficult enough that I can’t believe it’s all natural and organic. Money is changing hands and/or the spirit of existing laws is being ignored to enforce or at least maim the optimal-for-users search experience. Certainly we can agree on that much.
> The point is there are non-trivial examples where it’s really hard to switch your default search engine away from Google/Bing
Bing is the only one you really get stuck with, and that only happens outside of the browser. You can change the search engine for searches started inside of Edge.
Bing is also not an example of collusion. It's Microsoft promoting Microsoft.
> I don’t really know what we’re arguing anymore.
Here is what I'm arguing: If you want to say there is a mixture of different types of collusion and monopolistic self-pushing connected to search engines, I agree with you. But the claim earlier was about a very specific type of [deep] collusion, that would make it difficult to change the search engine that a browser uses, that is easy to see when trying to use Kagi. But that difficulty only exists on iOS. It's not true in general. (And I'm not convinced that the specific issue on iOS is a collusion problem rather than an Apple-knows-best problem.)
> To set it as your default search engine on iOS, you need to first install a separate Kagi Search app from the App Store, enable the extension, and then dig through some fairly obscure Safari settings so that the Kagi app can run with enough permissions to intercept/redirect search URLs for other search engines.
And worse, even then it will then only work (at least for me) about 3 times of 4. The other times it will give you the "dummy" site you don't want, and you'll have to reload to get Kagi. Or sometimes it will reload for you after an indeterminate delay, sometimes even after you've already clicked through to a result.
I'm still (mostly) happy with Kagi, but I gave up using their extension for Safari on desktop. I'm having much better luck using a custom redirect in StopTheMadness. I'm not sure what they do differently, but setting Safari to use Ecosia and redirecting with StopTheMadness seems to avoid the problems I was having with Kagi's dedicated extension.
that extension intercepts the queries. Kagi couldn't make it any other way. And I don't mean this as a grievance against Kagi, but agains APPL's policies.
It’s Safari you’re talking about. All other browsers, even Chrome, support arbitrary default search engines, while Safari doesn’t even support them via extension, requiring ugly redirect hacks. Privacy Pass is similar, with all browsers letting you implement it as an extension, except Safari. The problem is entirely and only Safari.
> Trying to use Kagi with other browsers lays bare the depth of collusion between browser makers and search providers.
Absolutely. Safari not offering any way to add Kagi without weird hacks or extensions is absurd.
I get the case for search engines paying browser vendors a cut for being the default, but still getting paid after the user has overridden that selection is already somewhat dubious, and not allowing the user to fully provide their own query URL at all should be illegal.
I'm curious how you think this can be analyzed effectively.
Yes, I'm aware of bytecode analysis, but that's a slow difficult process, and for browsers, the release cycle is short enough that by the time you're done analyzing the current version, a new version is out, and it's significantly harder and less useful to diff a binary, so you end up having to basically start the analysis over for the new version. Unless there's something going on here that I don't know of, that's simply not a viable means of keeping track of browser security.
Evaluating browser security is hard. Checking privacy guarantees is easy: you can just look at the traffic it generates. Vlad has a pretty simple and quite strong policy that Kagi doesn’t phone home unless you agree to it. If you find it does otherwise (should be pretty easy to monitor) you should take it up with him.
I doubt this is the case. They were working on a prototype back in October 2023 [1], but then the contractor bailed out [2], but now they got (probably different) people working on it now
I think this is correct. I refuse to touch Chromium with a ten-foot pole, but there aren't really any other options on Linux. (Yes, there is LibreWolf and other forks, but I doubt any have the resources to "go it alone" should Mozilla fold or go completely turncoat.)
The closest extant option is something like GNOME Web (also based on WebKit like Orion) but the lack of extension support and poor performance makes it a non-starter.
As someone who already pays for Kagi search, Orion will definitely be on my radar. I'll gladly volunteer $5/mo if I can just copy-paste my extensions unchanged and keep browsing.
WebKitGTk performance has improved a ton in the past few releases. Orion will ofc match that. Also working on WebExtensions in upstream hopefully by end of year.
Kagi mixes many different sources, including some from their own indexes. They lean heavy into the "try to answer using an integration with a more focused oracle" rather than the "throw as many sites at the user as possible" approach.
I'm a Kagi user and did a couple of test searches just now. Ignoring inserts like image results and "related searches" and so on, the results were completely different.
Note that if it this were true, Kagi brings features to the table that make it worth the price. For one, it allows you to prioritize/deprioritize sites, and it allows you to block sites from all search results.
Having been wondering what their cross platform plans for Orion were the other day and seeing this in the FAQ I don't think it's fair to frame it as small potatoes work just because it could have been even harder. It's still real work and a significant effort. https://help.kagi.com/orion/faq/faq.html#other_os_support:
"Are there plans for a Windows/Linux/Android version of Orion?
We currently do not have the resources to hire a new team to do any of these platforms yet.
Since Orion is funded by its users only, it is entirely up to the number of subscribers and Orion+ sales we have that will enable funding a new team to make Orion for any new platform. And building a browser is not cheap, especially one on top of WebKit."
Interesting that they concluded Linux was the next most worthwhile one to target but I suppose is probably more popular with users attracted to Kagi/Orion.
The CEO of Kagi has fairly strong views on user privacy as far as I can tell. I don’t know what his opinion of Windows is, but I’m willing to bet there’s a personal dislike of Windows and Android that is at least partially affecting the decision-making process here.
They also don’t seem like they’re trying to go big, just stay profitable.
Sure, can be. On the other hand, most people are running Google’s Android or a PRC-market exclusive offshoot on Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei and OnePlus phones. That’s Android. Everything else is a rounding error.
That seems like saying people who climb Everest are not starting in the Mariana Trench. The fact you could have made it ten times harder doesn't necessarily stop it being foolhardy.
Wrong analogy if you ask me. Building a browser without the render engine and scripting engine is a walk in the park compared to building the entire thing, which would correspond to climbing the mt Everest.
Kagi has been one of the biggest value adds to my online life in a long time. Paying for the Kagi ultimate plans gets me access to the latest LLM models, and an incredible customizable search engine with a large focus on privacy. The Orion browser has been my favorite to use on iOS, I’m not sure if I’d use the desktop version because of its web kit base. But I’m glad to see it’s moving forward.
Using a non-chromium browser is actually the only thing we can do nowadays to promote an open web. Also I have next to no issues using webkit on the web currently. It’s a good engine now.
I believe the above is just referring to diversity of engines. If 99% of everyone uses Chromium then there’s no incentive to support open standards that work across all browsers.
It seems that a lot of them are sort of "off" by default to keep search focused on search. If you want to get an LLM summary of a search, for example, end the search with a question mark. Example: "what is gravity?" instead of "what is gravity".
I use that super often, probably in vast majority of searches. It's basically an llm synthesized version of the results. You can also get it by the shortcut `q` on the results page, or by ending your query with a `?`
I'm probably not the only one who got an email from "Brandon Saltalamacchia" with
We're giving you a full 30-day trial of Kagi Professional because we know you'll
love it. Click "here" to activate your trial, no strings attached.
Well, clicked on it, saw that OF COURSE it'll convert to a normal subscription after the trial, which I usually wouldn't have a big problem with, but this is clearly a string that is very much attached. This kind of BS communication does not leave a good impression on me.
A few weeks ago, I saw a blog post here about their new billing policy[1]: if you don't use Kagi during a month, they'll pause your subscription.
Personally, because of this one feature of their subscription, I don't feel too bad about such "trial schemes".
I'm not affiliated with Kagi, nor am I a paid customer.
Again: I usually would not have a problem with this at all. All I'm asking for is honest communication. It's not difficult. In this case, just write: "If you subscribe to Kagi Professional now, we'll give you the first month for free!". I probably would have taken that offer.
Trial does not convert to subsription automatically, you got that wrong. It is just how Stripe trial code works. We may may mistakes from time to time but Kagi is not and never will be in the business of BS communication or deceiving customers. Fighting against those kind of practices and bringing sanity to the web is the entire reason I started the company.
I apologize for getting this wrong, but I hope you can see that it is very hard to parse this any other way than "This is a Kagi Professional subscription, which is free during the first 30 days and will cost you $11.90/month afterwards".
(Unfortunately, I cannot edit my parent post anymore to correct this)
I got that email too. When it wanted my credit-card number I didn't have my wallet by my side so I thought I'd do it later. When I remembered the next day and wanted to give it a try again I was told I had already used the code.
Orion for macOS is still pretty buggy and, in my experience, a bit too frustrating to use as my default browser. I want to use it and pay the $5/month even though I don't use it all the time. It's close to being good, but not quite there yet.
Yeah, I basically give orion a try every few months, I think the idea is fantastic. But it just hasn't ever hit the level of bug-free reliability that I would need, especially with extension compatibility. (Can't say this is surprising at all - making a web browser would be a ton of work even if the web wasn't a moving target)
It does seem like their long tail of issues is going down - each time I check in, it is clearly improved. So fingers crossed it continues to get better ...
I think the biggest problem ends up being what Apple makes available to it. It does so well at feeling just like Safari, but Apple appears to not make Apple Pay, Safari keychain, and automatic sms code entry (easily) accessible to third party apps. That's what keeps making me switch back to Safari
Yeahhhh this exact bug is why I haven’t been able to use Orion as my main browser. I usually use Safari, pretty much purely for the battery life gains.
Counteranecdata: I use Orion every day as my daily driver on my work machine, together with Bitwarden for passwords and a couple simple extensions. I can’t remember it crashing or failing to render a page, and at least on my apple silicon machine, it has been very polite with resources.
The current version of Bitwarden straight up doesn't work in Orion [0]. I ran into this yesterday when setting it up for the first time. Wasn't a great first experience as it's literally the only extension that is a deal breaker to me.
I'm still giving Orion a chance for now... I just installed a slightly older version that works.
Same, in a way. I've been using it for a couple months on my MacBook Pro M2 Max, zero issues. Recently I installed it on my work laptop, M4 Max, and I get frequent crashes. No idea why it would make a difference.
I recently tried it on iPad and unfortunately it feels mostly like a slightly less intuitive Safari with some touch gestures missing, and missed opportunity to fix one of them (swiping right to go back doesn’t work while the sidebar is open). Once I got Kagi search to work in Safari there was no reason to use Orion.
Orion on YouTube is unusable at the moment. Click play, ad plays 1 second, disappears but then nothing else plays. Click again, another ad briefly appears and disappears. Have to resort back to Firefox with uBlock Origin just to watch YouTube
Qwant and Ecosia, two European search engines, announced on October 24, 2023, a partnership to develop a European search index to lessen their dependence on US tech giants Google and Microsoft.
https://insidetelecom.com/qwant-and-ecosia-are-building-an-i...
For the OpenWebSearch.eu initiative, 14 renowned European research and computer centers from 7 countries have joined forces to develop an open European infrastructure for web search
https://openwebsearch.eu/
Fair enough, but I want the best possible searches. So that means Kagi, which includes Google, Bing, Brave, Yandex, and its own small web indexer. Pure European search is just unrealistic right now. Not unless you prefer the Eastern European flavor of Yandex alone.
I’m in the same boat but for Kagi it’s a little different : I don’t pay them because they are privacy friendly (or at least that’s another reason) but because the search quality is better than everything else, including Google.
It's about jurisdiction. You can claim to be privacy friendly but if the laws in the country your services are being offered from can legally demand you break it...
There is no good alternative right now. Even eu-based ones use google's or bing's search indexes, essentially being a different frontend for google and bing, so imo it does not make much difference. Kagi sort of does sth similar, but much better imo, which is also why I use them.
There is a common initiative by ecosia and qwant to build their own index [0], which is hopeful though, and something to look forward to.
extra salt in the wound because they pay google for the queries. at least when searching yourself you pay with data, which may or may not be less profitable for them
I'm seeing similar attitudes in my country and am disgusted by it. It mirrors and reinforces the isolationist attitudes that we are seeing in the US. We should be looking outwards in an effort to diversify our options and strengthen our ties to other countries, rather than looking inwards. (Yes, I realize the EU is a collection of countries. Yet there is more to the world than the EU.)
If Kagi is truly cool, by cool I am including opposition to current American policies, and you think they offer a good product, then you shouldn't fret about supporting them. If they aren't cool, then by all means look for alternatives.
> I'm in Europe. I'm busy disengaging from US based services.
It's worth pointing out that you're going to struggle with this, and it's because (as all software engineers know) Europe has never supported a strong tech/software developer friendly culture. To be clear: I am not saying there are not fantastic devs in Europe (in fact, most of the devs I respect the most are European), but the EU has always struggled to pay competitively and grow its local software community. In fact, all the amazing software engineers I know in Europe.. work for US companies, making US software products (and making US total comp).
Here's a quote of Alan Kay talking about this is in 1997
> [Dijkstra] once wrote a paper—of the kind that he liked to write a lot of—which had the title On the fact that the Atlantic has two sides. It was basically all about how different the approaches to computing science were in Europe, especially in Holland and in the United States. In the US, here, we were not mathematical enough, and gee, in Holland, if you're a full professor, you're actually appointed by the Queen, and there are many other uh important distinctions made between the two cultures. So, uhm, I wrote a rebuttal paper, just called On the fact that most of the software in the world is written on one side of the Atlantic.
The time to address this, unfortunately for Europe, is not today, but 30-40 years ago.
You can't generalize the EU. It are dozens of completely different countries.
> In fact, all the amazing software engineers I know in Europe.. work for US companies, making US software products (and making US total comp).
What is an amazing software developer if it is not someone who delivers business value? Because there are a lot of software development companies in the Netherlands for instance, or teams part of companies, and they surely deliver business value or they wouldn't exist.
By now I would also bet that of the small subset of developers considering emigrating to the States, sure think they've now dodged a bullet.
They deliver a lot of value, and they’re even so good at it that they’re often consulting for large overseas companies. But it’s like ASML, do you see anyone making chips using their stuff in the Netherlands?
Not that I disagree, but I think it's more than that: the US have started a trend of "boycott the US" across those who used to consider them as allies after... you know the US government not only embraced fascism but also started threatening to invade said ex allies and destabilising Europe.
Pretty sure that there is a similar trend in Canada or Mexico, for instance.
Before these trade war escalations the US imposed an average tariff rate of about 3.5% on EU goods, notably lower than the EU’s 5.2% on US goods, and lacked the high, sector-specific tariffs seen in the EU. While the US maintained a relatively uniform rate, 2.5% on cars and slightly higher on food and chemicals—the EU targeted certain US sectors with very steep tariffs, like 32.3% on dairy.
We should also mention VAT. The EU’s 21% VAT jacks up prices, a €100 item hitting €121 will slash demand. This provided around €1 trillion revenue for EU governments in 2024. While the US’s typical 7% sales tax keeps a $100 item at $107, hurting demand less, total about $457 billion in 2024. This gap makes US goods pricier in the EU (27.7% markup with tariffs) versus EU goods in the US (10.8% markup), acting like an extra trade wall for American exports, while the EU’s VAT refund on exports gives their firms a edge.
Notice we haven’t even mentioned defense spending yet …
Please call me out if I'm just being delusional but I think VAT is a great way to tax rich people.
They already have a lot of ways to avoid taxes, but at least with VAT they pay the same as everybody else. They are going to buy expensive food or drinks at restaurants and 8% (in my country) of that is going to be taxed. Someone more modest is going to eat at a less expensive place and is going to pay 8% on something less expensive.
I'm aware of the luxury tax but I don't think it's better than the VAT tax.
For people in poverty, 8% is the difference between getting that extra carton of eggs or not getting it. For rich people, it doesn't matter. It's not that VAT doesn't tax rich people it's that it taxes poor people a lot harder.
Do you mean having a higher wealth and estate tax? They both exist where I live, although they tend to hit the poor much more than the rich.
> tax on stock trades
I agree on this one but I think it's not a good idea to penalize people that invest for the long term. Perhaps tax only trades that happened over less than 10 years or something.
I don't know where you live but the US doesn't have a wealth tax. You'll have to explain to me how a wealth tax hit the poor because the poor do not have wealth. A progressive wealth tax will tax someone based on net worth. By estate tax, I mean an inheritance tax which again, the poor typically don't leave massive inheritances so I'm not seeing how this hits the poor hard.
> You'll have to explain to me how a wealth tax hit the poor because the poor do not have wealth
I'm sorry, perhaps "poor" wasn't the best word. But let me explain what I was thinking: I live in Switzerland where wealth tax is very much more annoying to the middle-class than the rich. This is because it starts at around CHF80'000--a lot of people qualify--and isn't taxed progressively above CHF2 million. While the rich will pay the highest tier, the middle-class is going to suffer from it much more because they don't invest their wealth. Basically, they are losing wealth, especially after taking inflation into account.
Don't get me wrong, Switzerland is a very good country tax-wise. But your argument against VAT also works very much for other types of taxation.
> By estate tax, I mean an inheritance tax which again, the poor typically don't leave massive inheritances so I'm not seeing how this hits the poor hard
Yes, good point. In Switzerland there are actually only a few cantons that still have the inheritance tax. But I still think that most families would qualify for the estate tax. A middle class family is going to be hurt much more being taxed CHF10k than a rich one taxed CHF100k.
You've made yourself very understandable, thank you for explaining further. Doing a Francs to Dollars conversion, 80,000 francs is around 90,000 USD. This is much lower than it should be in my opinion. For comparison, Biden's proposed wealth tax would only affect people with $1 billion in assets or people $100 million in income for three consecutive years[1]. This is not only less than 1% of the country, it's less than .01% of the country. I think the asset numbers are a bit high but as proposed, only the Musks and the Zuckerbergs would be affected.
So the only issue I see with the Switzerland tax situation is that the numbers are too low and should be higher. The incentive should be to get people investing in the economy but not to a point of hoarding.
Yep, indeed this kind of wealth tax would seem much more popular. I wonder how well it would do in a federal vote in Switzerland.
I am very much in favor of increasing taxes for the very wealthy ($100 million in net worth seems like a good start).
I just don't want that kind of tax to do collateral damage to middle-class people. For example, Switzerland doesn't have capital gains tax (!!!) except if trading is your profession. If we introduce capital gains tax, sure it will tax the rich but they will be able to wave it off while middle-class investors will get hit too. That's why I said in my initial comment that it could be wise to only tax those that invested for less than 10 years. We could also imagine a system where your capital gains are taxed based on your net worth after the trade.
I'm considering cutting out American services as well. The US is starting trade wars left, right, and center, and the current government has barely gotten started. With the white house siding with the Russians, threatening war against Canada and Denmark, and the whole NATO situation, I think it'll be foolish of me to depend on American services. For all I know, our countries may well be at war by the end of the year.
As for privacy: American privacy laws are even more of a joke than the GDPR. The lack of privacy rights for non-American citizens is the main reason the GDPR bans storing PII in the US.
As for free speech: the kind of free speech American tech companies are offering right now is not something I'm very interested in. America ranking lower than my country in every freedom index I can find also doesn't help.
Furthermore, paying a browser that actively does business with Yandex doesn't sit well with me, even if it won't affect me directly. The comments the CEO made about not caring about "geopolitics" doesn't reassure me much, either.
America under Trump is the least free that America has ever been. Your freedom argument is outdated, The USA has a fascism problem right now and we are trying to fight it.
I can understand their position. USA appears to be leaving NATO and promoting Russia's interests (through both pulling back from treaties and allies, and embracing Russian style diplomacy and oligarchical government), it's pretty easy to see why Europeans would get squirmy about American companies.
> Can you explain why? From privacy and free speech perspectives aren’t US services now better?
In regards to privacy, the country is increasingly trying to pass age verification bills as a way to backdoor more surveillance into law while a billionaire is running around slurping up everyone's private data.
In regards to free speech, the President sues journalist he doesn't agree with, passed an executive order to target lawyers he doesn't like, and is trying to get a law passed that will allow him to further target people who try to hold him accountable.
To say the US is better on both privacy and free speech is either uninformed or delusional.
I wonder if companies will try to move away from services like Google Suite or Microsoft Teams or Slack. Because it essentially means that the US can read all the internal communications. That's a big security problem, especially now that the US have become... unstable.
I am seeing this a lot recently, people trying to switch to EU based alternatives.
I am not sure exactly what are your motivations but if it is privacy and trying to fight some sort of tyranny, I am afraid this might be a bit naive and maybe counterproductive.
The EU is as much influenced by the interests of Big tech than the US. Maybe even more in a way. The regulations and fines you hear about are kayfabe.
It is looking more and more like the net of regulations the EU is rolling out is turning Europe into a digital Gulag.
Right now they only really met a resistance for that ChatControl one [0] but they have been trying for years over and over again, and will probably win at the end.
The irony is if you want and EU alternative you might need to defeat the EU first, who has been preventing the emergence of alternatives for decades now. Or just selfhost as much as possible at home for now.
I use Orion a bit on Mac. The blocker for me is that it doesn't support Ublock Origin. They claim that their built in ad blocking does 90% of what you need, but I really just want to be able to remove page elements at will.
This is kind of surprising. For me, uBlock Origin works perfectly on Orion (installed from the Firefox store), and the element zapper / eyedropper in uBlock Origin works as well. I haven't seen any difference between uBlock Origin on Firefox vs Orion.
Orion has a native element remover, just click the paintbrush icon in the toolbar.
uBlock Origin support is at least partial because whenever I click an analytics-redirect link in my email and it opens in Orion, I get a uBlock “tracker blocked” page.
What exactly is the benefit over Waterfox or Ungoogled Chromium here? The FAQ https://kagi.com/orion/faq.html#firefox seems to be things that are specific to Mac or have privacy features already offered by open-source alternatives.
Fwiw, it's a webkit-based browser. Another alternative browser engine in a usable browser is a plus for the Ecosystem.
On the other hand, it promises to be a simple yet usable (builtin adblock + privacy) browser. Ime, brave is probably the closest however it has a lot of nagging around their crypto and ads.
No, it doesn't. Sorry, my comment was not worded clearly there. The nagging around crypto and ads on the homepage are a (anti-)feature of brave (that don't exist in Orion).
For the Mac version, one of the “features” is that it’s built with the native UI toolkit and tries to blend into the desktop instead of setting itself apart with “branded UI” like browsers tend to do these days. Presumably the Linux version (which I’m assuming is built with GTK) would similarly adhere to GTK desktop (mostly GNOME) conventions.
GNOME Web is extremely barebones, moreso than even Safari (which itself is pretty basic). On macOS, Orion kind of acts like a “Safari Pro” with a whole bunch of power user features like vertical tree-style tabs and profiles among many other things. I’d expect that under GNOME, Orion will be a power user oriented “GNOME Web Pro”.
Text selection jumps all around even on hacker news (I say even because HN is pretty has pretty simple html\css\etc). Any web site with non-english letters and complex layot kills it.
I assume you mean Orion. Does that still happen if you enable compatibility mode? I don't have the same problem, but I've reported several problems on the feedback forum and had some luck with getting them resolved.
Ooopsie. Yes, I was talking about the browser. I'll read about compatibility mode, but I'm not sure why would I need to enable something like this on an WebKit browser on MacOs while Safari is doing great.
I have been a happy user of Kagi search for a couple years, but I really hope they don't start going everywhere.
They have Kagi translate, they also mentioned building an email service. I like Kagi search because it works well. I actively avoid their other products because I want to encourage them to stay focused and make a good product.
Thank you for your feedback. Please do not avoid our other products :) It makes the Kagi eco-system stronger. We do not want to be a one product company, at mercy of big tech and other platforms. We are genuinly trying to create a user-friendly, user-centric alternative for consuming the web. It has always been the plan. And all that while keeping the search product changelog the most active of any search engine in the world https://kagi.com/changelog
Because a browser is not just the engine (JS, Wasm, ...). A chrome/Firefox derivate is far easier to create because you can piggyback on their integration work (and maintenance) around these components.
Wait... so they browser says it's supports manifest v2 and lets you install v2 extensions, but then they just silently don't work? That's pretty confusing behavior. Why even offer them if they're blocked on an OS level?
That is my understanding, they can’t fully implement some of the lower level functions on iOS. The APIs seem to fail but fail silently so you can install the extension, it appears to be working but it does not.
Kagi should try to find an additional revenue stream instead of trying super complicated and complex projects like maintaining a browser (even if it's just some kind of fork like Arc).
WebKit for Windows is not in a particularly well-maintained state, where WebKit-GTK (which is probably what Orion for Linux is built with) is in reasonable shape since it’s already used by GNOME Web (aka Epiphany). That might have something to do with it.
The gap between the Windows and GTK ports is shrinking. Every JIT tier has been enabled for JSC on Windows[1], and libpas (the custom memory allocator) should get enabled soon.
The Windows port is moving from Cairo to Skia soon as well, matching the GTK port (though I think the focus is enabling the CPU renderer to start).
Webkit's CI (EWS) is running the layout tests on Windows, and running more tests on Windows is mostly a matter of funding the hardware.
There's a few things still disabled on the Windows port, some rough edges, and not a lot of production use (Bun and Playwright are the main users). It'd definitely be more work than Linux, but it's not as bad as you'd think.
the decision to stick with WebKit for Linux is interesting, I haven't had a good time with WebKitGTK as it provides a subpar experience, so I wonder if Orion is going to be different in this regard
I'll chime in that Kagi has been an incredible improvement over Google and DuckDuckGo search wise.
I'm glad that we're seeing more alternatives in the web browser space and Orion being a paid option is believe it or not a selling point for them. I'm interested to see where it ends up.
I used to be a Kagi customer, but the fact that they waste their energy with all these distractions is depressing. They should instead build a real search engine and stop reselling Bing.
I tried out paid kagi for a 3 months (even if you pay in bitcoin they still require your address). One thing you might want to know before going in is that Kagi does not return many search results. It never returns more than two short pages of results (~100). It is impossible to use Kagi like you'd use a search engine from 1995-2015 to 'surf' the web and find things by accident. That said, google only ever returns <400 results and Bing only ever returns <900. So there are no real options for search these days.
I thought paid Kagi would be a real search engine. But it's not. And Kagi's browser is closed source so that's a no go too.
I’m a happy Kagi customer, but that’s an interesting use case for a search engine that I hadn’t previously considered. Is there a “golden era” of search engines returning results for discovery?
I use forums, wikis, and content aggregators (e.g. Reddit) to discover related topics. If a search engine returns too many results, I refine my search terms.
They probably need your address for tax purposes. Especially the EU is really strict on charging us VAT for foreign purchases.
It does completely kill the anonymity though, I agree. It's strange that in this case they're worse than something like duck duck go. Because they don't require payment they simply have less data on you (especially confirmed data). I'm sure kagi protects it but the data you don't even have is even better protected.
It’s not “browse search results” but more “curated stumbleupon”.
You can also change your search lens from just generic “web” to “small web”, “forums”, “academic” etc or create your own lenses.
I don’t think these answer your particular browsing pattern, but I for one am happy that it doesn’t return hundreds of results. I feel like that is kind of the point, even. I’d rather get fewer, but better, results and have it just say “look buddy, there isn’t anything else”. Plus, I’m not stopped from just adding `!g` to the query and getting 1000 garbage Google results if I want.
Can you explain your use case? Looking at hundreds of results from a search query doesn't strike me as "finding things by accident", but I'm curious to know more.
I used to do this too - it used to be that after you passed the first couple of pages of results from the major/mainstream sites the rest would be minor personal websites, forums, and similar. Find one good article on one of them and it was often worth adding to your bookmarks or RSS collection to ensure you saw the writer's later additions.
My use case for a search engine is for the search engine to return all URLs that match the search pattern I enter. Then I decide which of these I want to visit, not the search engine, becuase the search engine doesn't and cannot know what I want (especially since I might not even know). It's job is to spider the web and create the database for me to search in. It's job is not to tell me what I want like a social networking site.
Even when Google was good I can't really recall ever browsing beyond 100 results unless I was looking for a post in a forum, so I don't know that this is really a knock against them given that their value proposition is that you pay them and they don't collect your data. I do find it surprising that so many people in this thread seem to be excited about Orion; I'm not interested in using anything proprietary to browse the web.
I've liked things about macOS Orion but some key extensions basically only work with Chromium browsers. That's not really on the Orion team, Chromium has a bunch of stuff neither WebKit nor Gecko support specifically around the file system and in-memory blob sizes
I've been loving Kagi search and am really looking forward to Orion being available outside Apple land. You can join the email list here: https://kagi.com/changelog#6479
I'm a bit worried that Kagi might be over-extending here. Instead of focusing and capitalizing on search, they're expanding to the difficult business of browsers. I'm always hesitant when companies try to do everything everywhere all at once, since that might cause a loosening of focus on the original product.
I hope them all the best nonetheless - people actually paying for software is due a comeback!
Trying to use Kagi with other browsers lays bare the depth of collusion between browser makers and search providers. Getting out from under all that makes Kagi a whole lot more seamless and useful.
It’s ironic that it is its own tight collusion, with the difference that you can use Orion just as well with any other search providers as with Kagi.
So yeah, it seems like a departure from search, until you consider that for the features that make Kagi a worthwhile search product (privacy, neutrality, etc), “you can’t get there from here” with the other browsers.
This is something I don't understand. Kagi has been my only search engine since they dropped the price to $10/mo. I've only ever used Kagi with Firefox, and I use it on Linux, Windows, and Mac. I just add it to my search engines and set it as default, which takes about 15 seconds.
Everything seems to just work seamlessly. Searching in private windows works without any configuration or token juggling.
I have never tried the Orion browser or the extension because I don't understand the problem that they allegedly solve.
To set it as your default search engine on iOS, you need to first install a separate Kagi Search app from the App Store, enable the extension, and then dig through some fairly obscure Safari settings so that the Kagi app can run with enough permissions to intercept/redirect search URLs for other search engines.
So now when I search in Safari, the browser says “DuckDuckGo Search” but when I hit return Kagi jumps in. I also had to turn off search suggestions because those (as far as I know) would still come from DDG.
This seems more like an indictment of iOS than collusion between search and browser vendors. I'm using Kagi as my default search on Android, Linux, Mac, and Windows, both Chrome and Firefox. The kind of nonsense your describing us why iOS doesn't show up in my list of devices.
My point was more that you claimed to not understand and I was just providing an example where it does take longer than “15 seconds” to switch to Kagi.
iOS/iPhone has the majority mobile market share in many countries including the United States. If you’re unaware, Google is currently being sued by the US government for establishing a monopoly over search engine placement including payments to Apple and Mozilla to keep Google as the default search engine. So, with that context, can you honestly say there’s no collusion between search providers and browser vendors?
Google pays to be the default. AFAIK they don't pay to make the switching experience maliciously difficult. After all, the switching experience on Android is dead simple. That seems to be another unilateral decision by Apple to keep you in your lane.
> My point was more that you claimed to not understand and I was just providing an example where it does take longer than “15 seconds” to switch to Kagi.
It's an example, but it's not an example that proves the point.
> iOS/iPhone has the majority mobile market share in many countries including the United States. If you’re unaware, Google is currently being sued by the US government for establishing a monopoly over search engine placement including payments to Apple and Mozilla to keep Google as the default search engine. So, with that context, can you honestly say there’s no collusion between search providers and browser vendors?
Yes, easily.
The comment was talking about depth of collusion in making it significantly not seamless. But even with Google pushing a default, it's a trivial switch on Android.
On top of that, Google pushing their search engine onto Android phones has nothing to do with "browser vendors". It's a different topic.
So I say Android is not an example, and desktop is fine, leaving the only example of problems as Apple. Even if I think that's collusion, just Apple doing a thing is not collusion over the general market of browser makers. But I'm also skeptical that it's collusion. Apple always offers limited choices and bad customizability.
I find it hard to believe that Google just happens to be the default search engine everywhere. And that the best user experience for Apple’s users is to have a search engine list that you have to pay to be on. And that if you change your default search engine or browser newtab half the browsers out there will nag you to switch it back for “security”. And if you visit the internet’s home page on anything other than Chrome you get bombarded with popups compelling you to install Chrome.
If you’re not aware of the “collusion” you might just be asleep at the wheel. You may be right semantically, though: it might not really be collusion—it’s simply light of day bribery.
> I find it hard to believe that Google just happens to be the default search engine everywhere.
I didn't say there wasn't collusion of any kind. I said Google being the default on android is not collusion with browser vendors.
And on Windows, Bing is the default.
> And if you visit the internet’s home page on anything other than Chrome you get bombarded with popups compelling you to install Chrome.
Self-promotion is not collusion.
Also critical to my point is that collusion to set a mere default is not what the original comment was talking about. You don't need to switch your browser to "lay bare the depth" of a default. They were talking about something much stronger.
The point is there are non-trivial examples where it’s really hard to switch your default search engine away from Google/Bing because all paths lead back to them (via platform self-promotion and paid placement). One might even argue that the dominant search engine owning the dominant user-agent is implicitly illegal (and thus I guess collusive, but I digress). I don’t really know what we’re arguing anymore. I think everyone knows that it’s not universally easy to switch your search engine. The fact that there are good examples like Android does not invalidate the bad examples like *OS and Windows. It’s difficult enough that I can’t believe it’s all natural and organic. Money is changing hands and/or the spirit of existing laws is being ignored to enforce or at least maim the optimal-for-users search experience. Certainly we can agree on that much.
> The point is there are non-trivial examples where it’s really hard to switch your default search engine away from Google/Bing
Bing is the only one you really get stuck with, and that only happens outside of the browser. You can change the search engine for searches started inside of Edge.
Bing is also not an example of collusion. It's Microsoft promoting Microsoft.
> I don’t really know what we’re arguing anymore.
Here is what I'm arguing: If you want to say there is a mixture of different types of collusion and monopolistic self-pushing connected to search engines, I agree with you. But the claim earlier was about a very specific type of [deep] collusion, that would make it difficult to change the search engine that a browser uses, that is easy to see when trying to use Kagi. But that difficulty only exists on iOS. It's not true in general. (And I'm not convinced that the specific issue on iOS is a collusion problem rather than an Apple-knows-best problem.)
> To set it as your default search engine on iOS, you need to first install a separate Kagi Search app from the App Store, enable the extension, and then dig through some fairly obscure Safari settings so that the Kagi app can run with enough permissions to intercept/redirect search URLs for other search engines.
And worse, even then it will then only work (at least for me) about 3 times of 4. The other times it will give you the "dummy" site you don't want, and you'll have to reload to get Kagi. Or sometimes it will reload for you after an indeterminate delay, sometimes even after you've already clicked through to a result.
I'm still (mostly) happy with Kagi, but I gave up using their extension for Safari on desktop. I'm having much better luck using a custom redirect in StopTheMadness. I'm not sure what they do differently, but setting Safari to use Ecosia and redirecting with StopTheMadness seems to avoid the problems I was having with Kagi's dedicated extension.
Just as a heads up, the Firefox iOS app makes it super easy to set Kagi to your default search engine.
I think it might have even just sync’d over from my desktop settings? I never even thought about it, it just worked.
I use Kagi at work in Firefox and Edge with no issues. I use it at home with Firefox and Chrome (Windows 10) and Iceraven on Android. No issues.
Yet the list of search engines in iOS Safari is locked and I can't add my own.
I had to install the Kagi for Safari app on iOS. This lets me install the extension and switch it to on my phone.
that extension intercepts the queries. Kagi couldn't make it any other way. And I don't mean this as a grievance against Kagi, but agains APPL's policies.
They might want to push Privacy Pass with their own browser. It requires an extension on Chrome and Firefox.
It’s Safari you’re talking about. All other browsers, even Chrome, support arbitrary default search engines, while Safari doesn’t even support them via extension, requiring ugly redirect hacks. Privacy Pass is similar, with all browsers letting you implement it as an extension, except Safari. The problem is entirely and only Safari.
> Trying to use Kagi with other browsers lays bare the depth of collusion between browser makers and search providers.
Absolutely. Safari not offering any way to add Kagi without weird hacks or extensions is absurd.
I get the case for search engines paying browser vendors a cut for being the default, but still getting paid after the user has overridden that selection is already somewhat dubious, and not allowing the user to fully provide their own query URL at all should be illegal.
> (privacy, neutrality, etc)
It's proprietary. There's no way of knowing that it's private.
If only we had a field of computer science dedicated to analyzing the security properties of black boxes…
I'm curious how you think this can be analyzed effectively.
Yes, I'm aware of bytecode analysis, but that's a slow difficult process, and for browsers, the release cycle is short enough that by the time you're done analyzing the current version, a new version is out, and it's significantly harder and less useful to diff a binary, so you end up having to basically start the analysis over for the new version. Unless there's something going on here that I don't know of, that's simply not a viable means of keeping track of browser security.
Evaluating browser security is hard. Checking privacy guarantees is easy: you can just look at the traffic it generates. Vlad has a pretty simple and quite strong policy that Kagi doesn’t phone home unless you agree to it. If you find it does otherwise (should be pretty easy to monitor) you should take it up with him.
They started with Orion.
Their original product was an AI product, that later transformed into the search engine. Then, Orion was developed
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/history.html
Yeah, probably messed up the timeline because Orion had an earlier public release.
Oh really? I did not know that. Sounds a lot better than the other way around
My guess is that they realize the opportunity created by Mozilla’s sudden change in privacy terms.
I doubt this is the case. They were working on a prototype back in October 2023 [1], but then the contractor bailed out [2], but now they got (probably different) people working on it now
[1]: https://orionfeedback.org/d/6363-orion-for-linux
[2]: https://orionfeedback.org/d/6363-orion-for-linux/30
I think this is correct. I refuse to touch Chromium with a ten-foot pole, but there aren't really any other options on Linux. (Yes, there is LibreWolf and other forks, but I doubt any have the resources to "go it alone" should Mozilla fold or go completely turncoat.)
The closest extant option is something like GNOME Web (also based on WebKit like Orion) but the lack of extension support and poor performance makes it a non-starter.
As someone who already pays for Kagi search, Orion will definitely be on my radar. I'll gladly volunteer $5/mo if I can just copy-paste my extensions unchanged and keep browsing.
WebKitGTk performance has improved a ton in the past few releases. Orion will ofc match that. Also working on WebExtensions in upstream hopefully by end of year.
They've been working on Orion for years.
Doesn't Kagi Search just regurgitate Google's search results?
Kagi mixes many different sources, including some from their own indexes. They lean heavy into the "try to answer using an integration with a more focused oracle" rather than the "throw as many sites at the user as possible" approach.
Not in my experience. Can also block or derank domains in your result, no more quora or Pinterest.
I'm a Kagi user and did a couple of test searches just now. Ignoring inserts like image results and "related searches" and so on, the results were completely different.
Note that if it this were true, Kagi brings features to the table that make it worth the price. For one, it allows you to prioritize/deprioritize sites, and it allows you to block sites from all search results.
This is what Brave Search does too with Goggles.
Kagi has much better results in my experience.
Never seen that happen and I've done hundreds of comparative searches by now.
Considering that Kagis’s results are actually useful and google just brings up listicles and ads, I’d say no.
Relax, they didn't write the entire browser. It's webkit based.
Having been wondering what their cross platform plans for Orion were the other day and seeing this in the FAQ I don't think it's fair to frame it as small potatoes work just because it could have been even harder. It's still real work and a significant effort. https://help.kagi.com/orion/faq/faq.html#other_os_support:
"Are there plans for a Windows/Linux/Android version of Orion?
We currently do not have the resources to hire a new team to do any of these platforms yet.
Since Orion is funded by its users only, it is entirely up to the number of subscribers and Orion+ sales we have that will enable funding a new team to make Orion for any new platform. And building a browser is not cheap, especially one on top of WebKit."
Interesting that they concluded Linux was the next most worthwhile one to target but I suppose is probably more popular with users attracted to Kagi/Orion.
Linux is the platform which WebKit has the best support for, following macOS.
The CEO of Kagi has fairly strong views on user privacy as far as I can tell. I don’t know what his opinion of Windows is, but I’m willing to bet there’s a personal dislike of Windows and Android that is at least partially affecting the decision-making process here.
They also don’t seem like they’re trying to go big, just stay profitable.
Android can be much more private than iOS if you pull the right levers - GrapheneOS is based on Android after all.
Sure, can be. On the other hand, most people are running Google’s Android or a PRC-market exclusive offshoot on Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei and OnePlus phones. That’s Android. Everything else is a rounding error.
How do you stop signaling to Google on android without using GrapheneOS or another aftermarket OS?
I recently decided against Orion because I have linux machines as well. Can’t use it if it doesn’t sync across all my devices.
That seems like saying people who climb Everest are not starting in the Mariana Trench. The fact you could have made it ten times harder doesn't necessarily stop it being foolhardy.
Wrong analogy if you ask me. Building a browser without the render engine and scripting engine is a walk in the park compared to building the entire thing, which would correspond to climbing the mt Everest.
Didn’t Kagi ship Orion first, before the search product?
No, they made Kagi first. See their history page: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/history.html
Kagi has been one of the biggest value adds to my online life in a long time. Paying for the Kagi ultimate plans gets me access to the latest LLM models, and an incredible customizable search engine with a large focus on privacy. The Orion browser has been my favorite to use on iOS, I’m not sure if I’d use the desktop version because of its web kit base. But I’m glad to see it’s moving forward.
Using a non-chromium browser is actually the only thing we can do nowadays to promote an open web. Also I have next to no issues using webkit on the web currently. It’s a good engine now.
> Using a non-chromium browser is actually the only thing we can do nowadays to promote an open web.
Orion is closed source.
I believe the above is just referring to diversity of engines. If 99% of everyone uses Chromium then there’s no incentive to support open standards that work across all browsers.
I keep being confused by this. People mention that Kagi has all these features but I never see them, do I have to up my subscription plan?
It seems that a lot of them are sort of "off" by default to keep search focused on search. If you want to get an LLM summary of a search, for example, end the search with a question mark. Example: "what is gravity?" instead of "what is gravity".
The summarizer lives at a different page, here: https://kagi.com/summarizer/
Can also click the quick answer link on existing search results page.
And each search result item had a menu that includes an option to summarize the page.
I use that super often, probably in vast majority of searches. It's basically an llm synthesized version of the results. You can also get it by the shortcut `q` on the results page, or by ending your query with a `?`
Oh I see. I knew "lenses" existed but as you say it's a multi-step process to use them and not from the browser search bar.
You need the ultimate plan to get the assistant which gives access to lots of llms
I'm probably not the only one who got an email from "Brandon Saltalamacchia" with
Well, clicked on it, saw that OF COURSE it'll convert to a normal subscription after the trial, which I usually wouldn't have a big problem with, but this is clearly a string that is very much attached. This kind of BS communication does not leave a good impression on me.A few weeks ago, I saw a blog post here about their new billing policy[1]: if you don't use Kagi during a month, they'll pause your subscription. Personally, because of this one feature of their subscription, I don't feel too bad about such "trial schemes".
I'm not affiliated with Kagi, nor am I a paid customer.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42944371
Again: I usually would not have a problem with this at all. All I'm asking for is honest communication. It's not difficult. In this case, just write: "If you subscribe to Kagi Professional now, we'll give you the first month for free!". I probably would have taken that offer.
Trial does not convert to subsription automatically, you got that wrong. It is just how Stripe trial code works. We may may mistakes from time to time but Kagi is not and never will be in the business of BS communication or deceiving customers. Fighting against those kind of practices and bringing sanity to the web is the entire reason I started the company.
Thank you for chiming in, it is really appreciated. This is what I see when trying to redeem this:
https://imgur.com/a/NJvCagh
I apologize for getting this wrong, but I hope you can see that it is very hard to parse this any other way than "This is a Kagi Professional subscription, which is free during the first 30 days and will cost you $11.90/month afterwards".
(Unfortunately, I cannot edit my parent post anymore to correct this)
I got that email too. When it wanted my credit-card number I didn't have my wallet by my side so I thought I'd do it later. When I remembered the next day and wanted to give it a try again I was told I had already used the code.
Guess not then.
Orion for macOS is still pretty buggy and, in my experience, a bit too frustrating to use as my default browser. I want to use it and pay the $5/month even though I don't use it all the time. It's close to being good, but not quite there yet.
Yeah, I basically give orion a try every few months, I think the idea is fantastic. But it just hasn't ever hit the level of bug-free reliability that I would need, especially with extension compatibility. (Can't say this is surprising at all - making a web browser would be a ton of work even if the web wasn't a moving target)
It does seem like their long tail of issues is going down - each time I check in, it is clearly improved. So fingers crossed it continues to get better ...
I think the biggest problem ends up being what Apple makes available to it. It does so well at feeling just like Safari, but Apple appears to not make Apple Pay, Safari keychain, and automatic sms code entry (easily) accessible to third party apps. That's what keeps making me switch back to Safari
Some bugs are pretty bad. There was one that drained my battery in 30mins. But I know it is difficult for a small team.
Yeahhhh this exact bug is why I haven’t been able to use Orion as my main browser. I usually use Safari, pretty much purely for the battery life gains.
How long ago was that? I've been seeing consistent progress on bugginess.
This was actually just last week. I guess GitHub made that, but I could not yet reproduce it.
Counteranecdata: I use Orion every day as my daily driver on my work machine, together with Bitwarden for passwords and a couple simple extensions. I can’t remember it crashing or failing to render a page, and at least on my apple silicon machine, it has been very polite with resources.
The current version of Bitwarden straight up doesn't work in Orion [0]. I ran into this yesterday when setting it up for the first time. Wasn't a great first experience as it's literally the only extension that is a deal breaker to me.
I'm still giving Orion a chance for now... I just installed a slightly older version that works.
[0] https://orionfeedback.org/d/10197-bitwarden-hangs-on-load
Same, in a way. I've been using it for a couple months on my MacBook Pro M2 Max, zero issues. Recently I installed it on my work laptop, M4 Max, and I get frequent crashes. No idea why it would make a difference.
I recently tried it on iPad and unfortunately it feels mostly like a slightly less intuitive Safari with some touch gestures missing, and missed opportunity to fix one of them (swiping right to go back doesn’t work while the sidebar is open). Once I got Kagi search to work in Safari there was no reason to use Orion.
Orion on YouTube is unusable at the moment. Click play, ad plays 1 second, disappears but then nothing else plays. Click again, another ad briefly appears and disappears. Have to resort back to Firefox with uBlock Origin just to watch YouTube
Yeah, seeing this one too. Is it an Orion or Safari thing though?
It killed my battery. tried for a month.
I’ve been full-timing it on iOS lately and yeah, pretty buggy. It comes with uBlock but doesn’t seem to work, and neither does bookmark/fave syncing.
Kagi is cool and all but...
I'm in Europe. I'm busy disengaging from US based services.
Any good EU alternatives?
Two ongoing projects to solve this:
Qwant and Ecosia, two European search engines, announced on October 24, 2023, a partnership to develop a European search index to lessen their dependence on US tech giants Google and Microsoft. https://insidetelecom.com/qwant-and-ecosia-are-building-an-i...
For the OpenWebSearch.eu initiative, 14 renowned European research and computer centers from 7 countries have joined forces to develop an open European infrastructure for web search https://openwebsearch.eu/
https://european-alternatives.eu/category/search-engines
Fair enough, but I want the best possible searches. So that means Kagi, which includes Google, Bing, Brave, Yandex, and its own small web indexer. Pure European search is just unrealistic right now. Not unless you prefer the Eastern European flavor of Yandex alone.
GOOD search might be worth a try: https://european-alternatives.eu/product/good-search
It’s hosted in Germany and uses the independent Brave search index.
I’m in the same boat but for Kagi it’s a little different : I don’t pay them because they are privacy friendly (or at least that’s another reason) but because the search quality is better than everything else, including Google.
However fwiw, Startpage is nice.
Keep in mind that Startpage is owned by an American advertising company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System1
As we're talking about Orion browser, there is Servo web engine and Servoshell backed by Linux Foundation Europe.
Its founder is from Yugoslavia, so it is European in a sense. https://vladimir.prelovac.com/
It's about jurisdiction. You can claim to be privacy friendly but if the laws in the country your services are being offered from can legally demand you break it...
There is no good alternative right now. Even eu-based ones use google's or bing's search indexes, essentially being a different frontend for google and bing, so imo it does not make much difference. Kagi sort of does sth similar, but much better imo, which is also why I use them.
There is a common initiative by ecosia and qwant to build their own index [0], which is hopeful though, and something to look forward to.
[0] https://blog.ecosia.org/eusp/
https://leta.mullvad.net
Seems to be based on Google and Brave, both US companies.
extra salt in the wound because they pay google for the queries. at least when searching yourself you pay with data, which may or may not be less profitable for them
I'm seeing similar attitudes in my country and am disgusted by it. It mirrors and reinforces the isolationist attitudes that we are seeing in the US. We should be looking outwards in an effort to diversify our options and strengthen our ties to other countries, rather than looking inwards. (Yes, I realize the EU is a collection of countries. Yet there is more to the world than the EU.)
If Kagi is truly cool, by cool I am including opposition to current American policies, and you think they offer a good product, then you shouldn't fret about supporting them. If they aren't cool, then by all means look for alternatives.
> I'm in Europe. I'm busy disengaging from US based services.
It's worth pointing out that you're going to struggle with this, and it's because (as all software engineers know) Europe has never supported a strong tech/software developer friendly culture. To be clear: I am not saying there are not fantastic devs in Europe (in fact, most of the devs I respect the most are European), but the EU has always struggled to pay competitively and grow its local software community. In fact, all the amazing software engineers I know in Europe.. work for US companies, making US software products (and making US total comp).
Here's a quote of Alan Kay talking about this is in 1997
> [Dijkstra] once wrote a paper—of the kind that he liked to write a lot of—which had the title On the fact that the Atlantic has two sides. It was basically all about how different the approaches to computing science were in Europe, especially in Holland and in the United States. In the US, here, we were not mathematical enough, and gee, in Holland, if you're a full professor, you're actually appointed by the Queen, and there are many other uh important distinctions made between the two cultures. So, uhm, I wrote a rebuttal paper, just called On the fact that most of the software in the world is written on one side of the Atlantic.
The time to address this, unfortunately for Europe, is not today, but 30-40 years ago.
You can't generalize the EU. It are dozens of completely different countries.
> In fact, all the amazing software engineers I know in Europe.. work for US companies, making US software products (and making US total comp).
What is an amazing software developer if it is not someone who delivers business value? Because there are a lot of software development companies in the Netherlands for instance, or teams part of companies, and they surely deliver business value or they wouldn't exist.
By now I would also bet that of the small subset of developers considering emigrating to the States, sure think they've now dodged a bullet.
They deliver a lot of value, and they’re even so good at it that they’re often consulting for large overseas companies. But it’s like ASML, do you see anyone making chips using their stuff in the Netherlands?
Very convincing quote.
> I'm busy disengaging from US based services.
Can you explain why? From privacy and free speech perspectives aren’t US services now better?
Kagi now probably has the best search privacy features in the world after recent upgrades with Privacy Pass and even a ToR endpoint.
Because the recent trade war has started a trend of "buy European' across the continent
buy-european-made.eu
Not that I disagree, but I think it's more than that: the US have started a trend of "boycott the US" across those who used to consider them as allies after... you know the US government not only embraced fascism but also started threatening to invade said ex allies and destabilising Europe.
Pretty sure that there is a similar trend in Canada or Mexico, for instance.
Before these trade war escalations the US imposed an average tariff rate of about 3.5% on EU goods, notably lower than the EU’s 5.2% on US goods, and lacked the high, sector-specific tariffs seen in the EU. While the US maintained a relatively uniform rate, 2.5% on cars and slightly higher on food and chemicals—the EU targeted certain US sectors with very steep tariffs, like 32.3% on dairy.
We should also mention VAT. The EU’s 21% VAT jacks up prices, a €100 item hitting €121 will slash demand. This provided around €1 trillion revenue for EU governments in 2024. While the US’s typical 7% sales tax keeps a $100 item at $107, hurting demand less, total about $457 billion in 2024. This gap makes US goods pricier in the EU (27.7% markup with tariffs) versus EU goods in the US (10.8% markup), acting like an extra trade wall for American exports, while the EU’s VAT refund on exports gives their firms a edge.
Notice we haven’t even mentioned defense spending yet …
Clown in charge is more than enough reason to divest from US.
Do you understand that stuff made in Europe and sold in Europe is also subject to the VAT?
it seems he also overlooked, in his tirade against EU VAT, that almost the whole world has VAT.
It's just an handful of countries like USA and Malaysia that are the weird ones, and don't implement a VAT tax
VAT is a reductive tax that taxes the poor instead of the rich. Coincidentally, Trump supports adding VAT to the US.
Please call me out if I'm just being delusional but I think VAT is a great way to tax rich people.
They already have a lot of ways to avoid taxes, but at least with VAT they pay the same as everybody else. They are going to buy expensive food or drinks at restaurants and 8% (in my country) of that is going to be taxed. Someone more modest is going to eat at a less expensive place and is going to pay 8% on something less expensive.
I'm aware of the luxury tax but I don't think it's better than the VAT tax.
For people in poverty, 8% is the difference between getting that extra carton of eggs or not getting it. For rich people, it doesn't matter. It's not that VAT doesn't tax rich people it's that it taxes poor people a lot harder.
I completely get your point. What would you suggest, then?
A wealth tax, an estate tax, a tax on stock trades are all better options that hit the wealthy and not the poor.
> A wealth tax, an estate tax
Do you mean having a higher wealth and estate tax? They both exist where I live, although they tend to hit the poor much more than the rich.
> tax on stock trades
I agree on this one but I think it's not a good idea to penalize people that invest for the long term. Perhaps tax only trades that happened over less than 10 years or something.
I don't know where you live but the US doesn't have a wealth tax. You'll have to explain to me how a wealth tax hit the poor because the poor do not have wealth. A progressive wealth tax will tax someone based on net worth. By estate tax, I mean an inheritance tax which again, the poor typically don't leave massive inheritances so I'm not seeing how this hits the poor hard.
> You'll have to explain to me how a wealth tax hit the poor because the poor do not have wealth
I'm sorry, perhaps "poor" wasn't the best word. But let me explain what I was thinking: I live in Switzerland where wealth tax is very much more annoying to the middle-class than the rich. This is because it starts at around CHF80'000--a lot of people qualify--and isn't taxed progressively above CHF2 million. While the rich will pay the highest tier, the middle-class is going to suffer from it much more because they don't invest their wealth. Basically, they are losing wealth, especially after taking inflation into account.
Don't get me wrong, Switzerland is a very good country tax-wise. But your argument against VAT also works very much for other types of taxation.
> By estate tax, I mean an inheritance tax which again, the poor typically don't leave massive inheritances so I'm not seeing how this hits the poor hard
Yes, good point. In Switzerland there are actually only a few cantons that still have the inheritance tax. But I still think that most families would qualify for the estate tax. A middle class family is going to be hurt much more being taxed CHF10k than a rich one taxed CHF100k.
I hope I made myself understandable.
You've made yourself very understandable, thank you for explaining further. Doing a Francs to Dollars conversion, 80,000 francs is around 90,000 USD. This is much lower than it should be in my opinion. For comparison, Biden's proposed wealth tax would only affect people with $1 billion in assets or people $100 million in income for three consecutive years[1]. This is not only less than 1% of the country, it's less than .01% of the country. I think the asset numbers are a bit high but as proposed, only the Musks and the Zuckerbergs would be affected.
So the only issue I see with the Switzerland tax situation is that the numbers are too low and should be higher. The incentive should be to get people investing in the economy but not to a point of hoarding.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/whats-the-so-called-weal...
Yep, indeed this kind of wealth tax would seem much more popular. I wonder how well it would do in a federal vote in Switzerland.
I am very much in favor of increasing taxes for the very wealthy ($100 million in net worth seems like a good start).
I just don't want that kind of tax to do collateral damage to middle-class people. For example, Switzerland doesn't have capital gains tax (!!!) except if trading is your profession. If we introduce capital gains tax, sure it will tax the rich but they will be able to wave it off while middle-class investors will get hit too. That's why I said in my initial comment that it could be wise to only tax those that invested for less than 10 years. We could also imagine a system where your capital gains are taxed based on your net worth after the trade.
I'm not sure what your point is. Are you saying that the EU isn't being "fair" to the US?
I'm not sure how that would change the incentive for European citizens to rely more on European products in the face of possible future tariffs.
I'm considering cutting out American services as well. The US is starting trade wars left, right, and center, and the current government has barely gotten started. With the white house siding with the Russians, threatening war against Canada and Denmark, and the whole NATO situation, I think it'll be foolish of me to depend on American services. For all I know, our countries may well be at war by the end of the year.
As for privacy: American privacy laws are even more of a joke than the GDPR. The lack of privacy rights for non-American citizens is the main reason the GDPR bans storing PII in the US.
As for free speech: the kind of free speech American tech companies are offering right now is not something I'm very interested in. America ranking lower than my country in every freedom index I can find also doesn't help.
Furthermore, paying a browser that actively does business with Yandex doesn't sit well with me, even if it won't affect me directly. The comments the CEO made about not caring about "geopolitics" doesn't reassure me much, either.
America under Trump is the least free that America has ever been. Your freedom argument is outdated, The USA has a fascism problem right now and we are trying to fight it.
Are you from the US?
I can understand their position. USA appears to be leaving NATO and promoting Russia's interests (through both pulling back from treaties and allies, and embracing Russian style diplomacy and oligarchical government), it's pretty easy to see why Europeans would get squirmy about American companies.
> Can you explain why? From privacy and free speech perspectives aren’t US services now better?
In regards to privacy, the country is increasingly trying to pass age verification bills as a way to backdoor more surveillance into law while a billionaire is running around slurping up everyone's private data.
In regards to free speech, the President sues journalist he doesn't agree with, passed an executive order to target lawyers he doesn't like, and is trying to get a law passed that will allow him to further target people who try to hold him accountable.
To say the US is better on both privacy and free speech is either uninformed or delusional.
I wonder if companies will try to move away from services like Google Suite or Microsoft Teams or Slack. Because it essentially means that the US can read all the internal communications. That's a big security problem, especially now that the US have become... unstable.
Absolutely. While I haven't heard of it happening yet, I have seen talks about doing so.
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I am seeing this a lot recently, people trying to switch to EU based alternatives.
I am not sure exactly what are your motivations but if it is privacy and trying to fight some sort of tyranny, I am afraid this might be a bit naive and maybe counterproductive.
The EU is as much influenced by the interests of Big tech than the US. Maybe even more in a way. The regulations and fines you hear about are kayfabe.
It is looking more and more like the net of regulations the EU is rolling out is turning Europe into a digital Gulag.
Right now they only really met a resistance for that ChatControl one [0] but they have been trying for years over and over again, and will probably win at the end.
The irony is if you want and EU alternative you might need to defeat the EU first, who has been preventing the emergence of alternatives for decades now. Or just selfhost as much as possible at home for now.
- [0] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/
Haha sure, nice try.
I use Orion a bit on Mac. The blocker for me is that it doesn't support Ublock Origin. They claim that their built in ad blocking does 90% of what you need, but I really just want to be able to remove page elements at will.
This is kind of surprising. For me, uBlock Origin works perfectly on Orion (installed from the Firefox store), and the element zapper / eyedropper in uBlock Origin works as well. I haven't seen any difference between uBlock Origin on Firefox vs Orion.
Thanks, will investigate again.
Orion has a native element remover, just click the paintbrush icon in the toolbar.
uBlock Origin support is at least partial because whenever I click an analytics-redirect link in my email and it opens in Orion, I get a uBlock “tracker blocked” page.
I'm using Orion with ublock origin right now?
What exactly is the benefit over Waterfox or Ungoogled Chromium here? The FAQ https://kagi.com/orion/faq.html#firefox seems to be things that are specific to Mac or have privacy features already offered by open-source alternatives.
Fwiw, it's a webkit-based browser. Another alternative browser engine in a usable browser is a plus for the Ecosystem.
On the other hand, it promises to be a simple yet usable (builtin adblock + privacy) browser. Ime, brave is probably the closest however it has a lot of nagging around their crypto and ads.
Kagi has crypto now too? I thought that was just brave.
The comment you replied to is also saying that they find the Brave crypto annoying.
I don't touch Brave because of the crypto thing and founder's affiliations.
Well yes so do I. I'll never use it
No, it doesn't. Sorry, my comment was not worded clearly there. The nagging around crypto and ads on the homepage are a (anti-)feature of brave (that don't exist in Orion).
Kagi does not have crypto
For the Mac version, one of the “features” is that it’s built with the native UI toolkit and tries to blend into the desktop instead of setting itself apart with “branded UI” like browsers tend to do these days. Presumably the Linux version (which I’m assuming is built with GTK) would similarly adhere to GTK desktop (mostly GNOME) conventions.
GNOME Web does that and it's open source. What's the selling point of Orion on Linux?
GNOME Web is extremely barebones, moreso than even Safari (which itself is pretty basic). On macOS, Orion kind of acts like a “Safari Pro” with a whole bunch of power user features like vertical tree-style tabs and profiles among many other things. I’d expect that under GNOME, Orion will be a power user oriented “GNOME Web Pro”.
I would say it's the business model. Customers paying you to provide a good service is straightforward for both parties
Primary source:
- "We're thrilled to announce that development of the Orion Browser for Linux has officially started!"
- "Register here to receive news and early access opportunities throughout the development year: https://forms.kagi.com/?q=orion_linux_news "
https://bsky.app/profile/kagi.com/post/3ljqsgjmkpk2n
(I interpret that to mean there's a closed beta?)
Not yet
Kagi is still buggy as hell for me though.
Text selection jumps all around even on hacker news (I say even because HN is pretty has pretty simple html\css\etc). Any web site with non-english letters and complex layot kills it.
I assume you mean Orion. Does that still happen if you enable compatibility mode? I don't have the same problem, but I've reported several problems on the feedback forum and had some luck with getting them resolved.
Ooopsie. Yes, I was talking about the browser. I'll read about compatibility mode, but I'm not sure why would I need to enable something like this on an WebKit browser on MacOs while Safari is doing great.
I have been a happy user of Kagi search for a couple years, but I really hope they don't start going everywhere.
They have Kagi translate, they also mentioned building an email service. I like Kagi search because it works well. I actively avoid their other products because I want to encourage them to stay focused and make a good product.
Thank you for your feedback. Please do not avoid our other products :) It makes the Kagi eco-system stronger. We do not want to be a one product company, at mercy of big tech and other platforms. We are genuinly trying to create a user-friendly, user-centric alternative for consuming the web. It has always been the plan. And all that while keeping the search product changelog the most active of any search engine in the world https://kagi.com/changelog
Orion was a letdown for me. I’ve tried multiple times to switch over but basic things like autofill not working consistently were dealbreakers.
I wish there were a Webkit based browser for Android.
There are dozens of Firefox- and Chrome-based browsers, but nothing else. Wonder why?
Igalia are doing an Android port of webkit named WPE-Android[1] including a mini browser shell. There is an APK you can run[2].
1. https://blogs.igalia.com/jani/bringing-webkit-back-to-androi...
2. https://github.com/Igalia/wpe-android/releases/tag/v0.1.3
I caught my fish! Thank you :-)
Because a browser is not just the engine (JS, Wasm, ...). A chrome/Firefox derivate is far easier to create because you can piggyback on their integration work (and maintenance) around these components.
Orion on iOS has been life changing for me.
As a Linux Firefox user who is Orion-curious I'd be interested in hearing more about how.
Full manifest v2 ublock origin on an iOS browser is pretty amazing.
You got me excited and I installed it but uBlock Origin does not work and is not supported on iOS.
If you have it installed and it appears to be working, it’s probably the default native ad blocker that’s doing the work.
https://orionfeedback.org/d/9145-ublock-origin-not-existent-...
My understanding is that Orion has already installed uBlock Origin out of the box. No need to install the extension.
Wait... so they browser says it's supports manifest v2 and lets you install v2 extensions, but then they just silently don't work? That's pretty confusing behavior. Why even offer them if they're blocked on an OS level?
That is my understanding, they can’t fully implement some of the lower level functions on iOS. The APIs seem to fail but fail silently so you can install the extension, it appears to be working but it does not.
I think failing loudly would be better for users.
Huh because I thought it was nuts I could block youtube ads. I thought it was ublock.
can you expound on this "life change"?
It allows Firefox and chrome extensions!
Not who you are responding to, but it properly blocks ads. I can actually view things like recipes on mobile. It's great! (Blocks YT ads too.)
Being able to set my default browser to Kagi was enough. I'll deal with Orion's bugs for now because I don't want to go back.
Kagi should try to find an additional revenue stream instead of trying super complicated and complex projects like maintaining a browser (even if it's just some kind of fork like Arc).
Nice, if it runs on Linux it can run on Windows through WSL.
I would've thought that Windows would be the next platform to port to given its larger user base.
Maybe the decision speaks to the distribution of Kagi users across operating systems.
WebKit for Windows is not in a particularly well-maintained state, where WebKit-GTK (which is probably what Orion for Linux is built with) is in reasonable shape since it’s already used by GNOME Web (aka Epiphany). That might have something to do with it.
The gap between the Windows and GTK ports is shrinking. Every JIT tier has been enabled for JSC on Windows[1], and libpas (the custom memory allocator) should get enabled soon.
The Windows port is moving from Cairo to Skia soon as well, matching the GTK port (though I think the focus is enabling the CPU renderer to start).
Webkit's CI (EWS) is running the layout tests on Windows, and running more tests on Windows is mostly a matter of funding the hardware.
There's a few things still disabled on the Windows port, some rough edges, and not a lot of production use (Bun and Playwright are the main users). It'd definitely be more work than Linux, but it's not as bad as you'd think.
[1] https://iangrunert.com/2024/10/07/every-jit-tier-enabled-jsc...
That’s great to hear. The more web engines are practical to use across all major platforms the better.
Great to see them leave the Apple cage.
But wondering why they would chose Linux before Windows and Android? Wouldn't these markets be much more relevant?
Easier to port to
The easiest solution would be to not port at all. Curious under what considerations it was deemed worthwhile for them to commit to this.
Very interested, their search tool has been good for me, just haven't been able to try the browser.
the decision to stick with WebKit for Linux is interesting, I haven't had a good time with WebKitGTK as it provides a subpar experience, so I wonder if Orion is going to be different in this regard
I'll chime in that Kagi has been an incredible improvement over Google and DuckDuckGo search wise.
I'm glad that we're seeing more alternatives in the web browser space and Orion being a paid option is believe it or not a selling point for them. I'm interested to see where it ends up.
If anyone from the Kagi team is reading this:
Why does Orion on iOS not support Bluetooth Web BLE ?? That would really set it apart from Safari...
Don't work on Kagi, but WebKit on iOS doesn't support it.
The library functions are there... Some browsers in the app store support it via native library functions (e.g. Webble browser).
I wonder if it is going to be proprietary-licensed (like their macOS version) or Free Software?
I used to be a Kagi customer, but the fact that they waste their energy with all these distractions is depressing. They should instead build a real search engine and stop reselling Bing.
a closed source browser is no go for me.
I tried out paid kagi for a 3 months (even if you pay in bitcoin they still require your address). One thing you might want to know before going in is that Kagi does not return many search results. It never returns more than two short pages of results (~100). It is impossible to use Kagi like you'd use a search engine from 1995-2015 to 'surf' the web and find things by accident. That said, google only ever returns <400 results and Bing only ever returns <900. So there are no real options for search these days.
I thought paid Kagi would be a real search engine. But it's not. And Kagi's browser is closed source so that's a no go too.
I’m a happy Kagi customer, but that’s an interesting use case for a search engine that I hadn’t previously considered. Is there a “golden era” of search engines returning results for discovery?
I use forums, wikis, and content aggregators (e.g. Reddit) to discover related topics. If a search engine returns too many results, I refine my search terms.
In my mind, the three eras of search engines are:
1) Before Google.
2) Google before ‘08.
3) Google after ‘08.
1 and 2 were both pretty good for just exploring.
I think Google after around 2022 is also another phase, where it became completely unusable.
> they still require your address
Provide a random one if this matters to you? It's not like they have any way to check.
They probably need your address for tax purposes. Especially the EU is really strict on charging us VAT for foreign purchases.
It does completely kill the anonymity though, I agree. It's strange that in this case they're worse than something like duck duck go. Because they don't require payment they simply have less data on you (especially confirmed data). I'm sure kagi protects it but the data you don't even have is even better protected.
You can detach searching from any association with your paid account:
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html
Yeah but that means trusting them.
I don't need to trust anyone not to share information they don't even have.
They should really allow anonymous payments like mullvad does. There you're just a random number and you can pay with crypto without any addresses.
Privacy Pass removes the need for 'trust'. It gives you cryptographical guarantees of anonymity.
Just as long as you now give your trust to the Kagi made browser extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kagi-privacy-...) that is required and has access to your browser. Big yikes.
Have you tried kagi small web?
https://kagi.com/smallweb/
It’s not “browse search results” but more “curated stumbleupon”.
You can also change your search lens from just generic “web” to “small web”, “forums”, “academic” etc or create your own lenses.
I don’t think these answer your particular browsing pattern, but I for one am happy that it doesn’t return hundreds of results. I feel like that is kind of the point, even. I’d rather get fewer, but better, results and have it just say “look buddy, there isn’t anything else”. Plus, I’m not stopped from just adding `!g` to the query and getting 1000 garbage Google results if I want.
Can you explain your use case? Looking at hundreds of results from a search query doesn't strike me as "finding things by accident", but I'm curious to know more.
I used to do this too - it used to be that after you passed the first couple of pages of results from the major/mainstream sites the rest would be minor personal websites, forums, and similar. Find one good article on one of them and it was often worth adding to your bookmarks or RSS collection to ensure you saw the writer's later additions.
Kagi has its “web” search, but you can switch to “small web” and get results like this. Or the “forums” lens if looking for user generated content.
My use case for a search engine is for the search engine to return all URLs that match the search pattern I enter. Then I decide which of these I want to visit, not the search engine, becuase the search engine doesn't and cannot know what I want (especially since I might not even know). It's job is to spider the web and create the database for me to search in. It's job is not to tell me what I want like a social networking site.
Even when Google was good I can't really recall ever browsing beyond 100 results unless I was looking for a post in a forum, so I don't know that this is really a knock against them given that their value proposition is that you pay them and they don't collect your data. I do find it surprising that so many people in this thread seem to be excited about Orion; I'm not interested in using anything proprietary to browse the web.
you may like to try https://marginalia-search.com which is great for finding things unexpectedly and much more from the small internet. https://stract.com is great too
https://millionshort.com/ might be the search engine you are looking for.
I've liked things about macOS Orion but some key extensions basically only work with Chromium browsers. That's not really on the Orion team, Chromium has a bunch of stuff neither WebKit nor Gecko support specifically around the file system and in-memory blob sizes
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