This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Not really from the grounds up as it uses WebKit.
Used it very shorty on a mac, but as it really is very similar to safari there is little to no reason to use it.
On a linux maybe, but i think i will stay on firefox until servo is usable. (Which is actually being made from the grounds up)
On Linux there is Falkon. Windows too. (QT WebKit) And the reason I won't use this will likely be the same as Falkon. Missing plugins etc. Other than that they are fine. Bitwarden has a desktop app. (Electron? Dunno but it would be ironic) But no auto fill ability. Darkreader? Nope. There may be some limited adblocking, but no greasemonkey type functionality.
Falkon stopped useing QTWebKit a few years ago. Now it's just an other Chromium-based browser.
Aaaah so even less reason to use it sadly.
Orion supports chrome and Firefox plugins
Really, that's actually interesting.
Not sure Servo will ever be usable. Is it still in active development?
It is. After development broke down in 2022 development is more active than it ever was. https://blogs.igalia.com/mrego/servo-2025-stats/ I have a binary on my machine and use it for light browsing every now and then just to check in how things are going. Its "usable" for that but would not use it for banking even if it worked.
Servo was developed by Mozilla between 2012 and 2020. In 2020 they layed off the people who were working on it and transferred to the Linux foundation. Servo was partially integrated into gecko as part of the Quantum project.
Servo has been picked back up by a community of devs outside of Mozilla (currently housed in the Linux Foundation Europe) and has been gaining momentum since 2023, to the point it seems to be moving faster now than when Mozilla was funding it.
I like that it can run both Firefox and Chrome extensions. I… don’t like much else about it.
It seems like it doesn’t use multiple cores efficiently. When I’m taxing my GPU for video transcoding all other web browsers hold up but this one always stalls.
It’s a shame. I use Kagi for search and id love to see them succeed together but the browser is not yet there. It went “out of beta” officially but not practically.
Would you be cool if I shared this feedback to the Kagi team? I love Kagi and want to help it improve and grow.
Please do. More browsers that aren’t Google-based or Firefox forks make go a healthier ecosystem.
That aside, gpu- video transcoding in the browser?? That's not what webbrowsers are made for.
No I meant same machine.
I think they meant background transcoding while using the browser.
I don’t even want to speculate on what’s going wrong there, heh. But I can definitely see that being a quirk.
"From the ground up" and "WebKit" seem contradictory. Why can't they use words by their meaning, I wonder?
But if it can be configured the way Firefox before dropping XUL was, then would be nice.
I've used it on both macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon) and iOS.
On macOS it's been fine, but nothing about it was unique or beneficial enough to make me switch to it as my default browser. I imagine the experience on Linux will be similar.
On iOS, I've been daily driving it for almost exactly a year. At first it was very buggy, and I once lost all of my opened tabs. But for the past 6-8 months it has been very solid, and is the only browser on iOS that allows me to use both ad and sponsor block plug-ins to my knowledge. Tab groups are also fantastic and easy to manage.
That sounds hopeful. :) Even if its just like any browser on Linux, fun to try it for a while.
I hope the launch goes well, I'll certainly give it a try.
I didn't find anything wrong with it on Mac, it was a perfectly cromulent browser. And anything that can help dethrone the chrome monopoly is a win in my book.
Oh heck yeah. I’ve been using it on iOS a ton, and dying for this on Windows/Linux.
Fun trivia: what browser supports HEIFs, JPEG XL AVIF, AV1, all with correctly rendered HDR?
Not Chrome. And not Firefox, nor anything based on them I’ve tried: https://caniuse.com/?search=image+format
jpeg xl! wow! that's cool!
I’ve been using it exclusively on my iPhone and iPad for about a year with zero issues and zero regrets. I’ve been looking forward to this release so I can also replace Firefox on my Linux pc
I’ve tried the iOS version of it a few times but the browser extensions I wanted to use did not work with it (both Chrome and FF extension versions). Oh well.
Yeah I have uBO installed and it doesn't seem to work. I just use it as a spare browser now outside of Safari and Firefox Focus.
You really don’t need uBO in Orion though. It has adblocking and zero-telemetry out of the box.
Right, but the point still stands that extensions are hit-or-miss.
Yeah, it’s buggy as hell every time I’ve tried it. Lots of random bugs that were open for a long time. Also not open source so I realize that doesn’t matter to everyone but for me it does especially for a browser.
I use it in iOS too and it’s great. I haven’t tried it on Mac, but I would. Id prefer open source solutions but for an iOS browser it’s solid.
I’ve tried Orion for a month. I really realized that I dont like the look of safari. Regarding performance issues, I didn’t have any. However I am a guy who just surfs around, nothing too specific or any drm content. It is just better trying it for a while than listening to comments and wondering. Kagi is not what I prefer to use, which might have had pushed me away further.
I've used it on iOS and iPadOS. It's not bad and I didn't find that it breaks too many sites, but the plugin support can be a bit buggy. Specifically I tried to install Ublock Origin (as one does) but I got some errors and the plugin didn't work. That being said it's built in adblocker is usually good enough. Overall I give it a 6/10, but if they update it so I can put Ublock origin on it I'll probably switch over to it in an instant.
Full Ublock is a mixed bag on mobile because it eats battery/performance, and (if you add all the same filter sources), integrated blockers like Orion’s are just about the same anyway.
I have tried it and liked the idea, but I wish they had started with open-source code already. Also, there seems to be no plans on Android, even though iOS has a version already (I know it's way easier since it's built for macOS so porting is easy). I also wish the UX could be closer to something like Zen, allowing me to use only icons for the open tabs, but I'm sure with time that'll be adjusted.
Hoping it goes far and we get another option 👏
