Zero – Local Encrypted Vault App (No Cloud, No Signup, Free)
1 points by techdobz 19m ago 0 comments
Are Cyber Defenders Winning? – Lawfare (lawfaremedia.org)
2 points by bariumbitmap 1h ago 0 comments
Orion Browser
101 gtirloni 90 7/31/2025, 2:11:29 PM kagi.com ↗
I would continue to pay Kagi $10 a month forever for exactly the product I signed up for - I have zero additional product wants or needs, zero additional ambitions for the service, zero things I'd like my money to be going to other than sustaining a high-quality service that solves a need for me. I don't need or want the AI features, I sure don't need a browser, and I'd really like all of this manic product energy to be going towards the core product so I can continue to enjoy it for the foreseeable future.
We started working on the browser before we started working on search. There were many browsers and search engines before us, and all of them failed because you can not compete with an ecosystem company (Google) with a single product. If your customers use your search engine, but then use Gmail and Chrome, your main competitor has means (friction) with them to attempt to win them back over (and you are paid, they are free!) if you ever become more than a nuisance.
This is why it was clear to me from day one that we need to offer a hollistic replacement for big tech for consuming the web - and search, browser and email (yes, we are building that too) account for 99% of consumption of the web.
Yes, it makes our job everything but simple, but without it we will not survive long term - I am 100% sure. (and in the meantime generative AI showed up and made things even more complicated)
I still love my job and the challenges it brings, every single day. While we live as a company in a complex environment we try to remove the complexity for our customers and make high quality products. I have pretty high standards for browsers and have been using them for almost 30 years - and Orion is by far the most powerful option on the market (speed/energy/privacy/features). Inviting you to give it a try.
I'd actually view the browser as a more difficult market to crack than search, because there are plenty of decent free options that have not obviously succumbed to the lure of advertising revenue yet. You're also always playing a "red queen's race" with the browser market where that friction you mention with Gmail and other google properties can be used to push people away from your browser. Similarly, for email, Fastmail and Proton are both fine answers for what to do without Google, and both cover a wide enough spread of the market that I'm not really looking for alternatives (and, relatedly, running an email service _sucks_ - if you haven't hired someone with large-scale public email service experience yet, you absolutely need to do so, because it's one of the worst problems on the internet).
The search market is different - you are, to the best of my knowledge, the only actual paid search engine out there, which means you're the only one whose interests align with mine and the only one who can pursue a product strategy of actually delivering the best available information to me.
This is part of why I'm concerned about dilution of focus - as a dedicated Kagi subscriber, the reason I'm here is because you offer good search aligned with my interests, and that's why I'm going to keep paying you money. The additional products in the pipeline weren't requirements to get or keep my business, and I suspect it's the same for many of your subscribers. I trust you to run your business - you've created a great product that I'm happy to pay for, so you've earned that - but please make sure you keep the search product top of mind and make sure that's a sustainable business.
Having best web search in the world has been our bread&butter from day one. This is what so many people pay us for!
Great search becomes even more important in the age of agents - model quality is converging to the same spot across frontier models and what will make great answers different from mediocre ones is the quality of search fed to them. We are currently testing v2 of our Search API with select partners and plan to make this generally available soon.
We 100% intend to continue to dominate this and we heavilly invest and innovate in search quality space. A major announcement soon.
> I am 100% sure
I'm definitely less than 100% sure. (I'd take a bet at those odds.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43982643
While Kagi has "only" about 50k customers, Orion was downloaded more than a million times last year and continues to be a major distribution channel and entry point for the Kagi eco-sytem. (you are not seeing any ads for Kagi right? Our products are our "ads", that is how we grow + wonderful user community)
And while you can use Kagi in any browser, it is a really nice experience when you use Orion (and it will get only better as we build more integrations). We are also aware about cross-platform users - which is why we are also developing Orion for Linux as the next platform, with more to come.
Not sure what point you wanted to make by linking to the comment - happy to address it after clarification.
[1] https://orionfeedback.org
[2] https://kagifeedback.org
I use Linux at home, Mac at work, and have an iPhone, and very few apps look native and work seamlessly across all 3.
Although I have to be honest - even as a very devoted and technical user, I still have no idea what or why assistant is.
Luckily it doesn’t take away from everything else you’ve built.
I would like to be able to see my emails appear in search results when relevant. Also would like to be able to quikly search the web when writing emails. This is not rocket science but for this you need deep integration between email and search. For some reason Google didn't do this in 20 years although perfectly capable of.
Besides Vimium, I generally experience enough bugs with other extensions or the browser itself that I just wind up not using Orion, despite following development for many years now.
What they're trying to achieve with Orion is very admirable but they simply don't have enough resources to pull it off. Making a browser is hard, making a cross platform webkit browser is even harder, making a cross platform webkit based browser that supports Firefox, Chrome, and in some cases Safari extensions is yet even harder.
I understand that businesses need to expand and innovate. But it sure is nice to have a rock-solid reliable tool that just works long-term; something that you can depend on without it suddenly morphing into a weird new thing after you've built up skills and processes around it.
[1]: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-orion-public-beta
But with the Kagi extension all my searches are always redirected to Kagi on both Safari on iOS and Safari on macOS so I don't really see this as a real blocker as a user.
I understand that this is an onboarding problem, but for a technical user that's really not something preventing me from using Kagi (Like the other comment mentions).
The included ad-blocker being a big factor in the great UX.
That means the address bar is my main interaction with the browser.
> I'd really like all of this manic product energy to be going towards the core product
What would that energy do if you don't need anything???
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/03/kag-orion-web-browser-co...
https://bsky.app/profile/kagi.com/post/3ljqsgjmkpk2n
You can signup to get notified at https://forms.kagi.com/?q=orion_linux_news
I VERY BADLY want to make this my daily driver across all of my devices, but between weird rendering bugs (which are decreasing), janky 1Pass support (which is improving), lacking history sync and the inability to run multiple instances like I can with Firefox*, it has been difficult to make the switch.
I know that Vlad and team are working hard to quash the bugs, so I'll keep trying the betas every once in a while.
*: I know that Safari and Orion have profiles. I prefer to isolate my browsers at a process level, i.e. a separate browser process for work and personal stuff. FF can mostly achieve this with Containers, which I used with the Multi-use Containers extension to create containers based on URL, but things gets weird with intermediate URLs. Safari cannot do this. Orion theoretically can, but I don't think it does right now.
The last good browser is Lynx
Then it's doing an awful job because it allows the user to disable everything related to crypto in 3 clicks, to never see it again.
Brave is a crypto company.
Bits 0x02: switching to Orion as a browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44681616 - July 2025 (28 comments)
Kagi Is Bringing Orion Web Browser to Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43302073 - March 2025 (226 comments)
Orion Browser by Kagi: Lightweight, WebKit Based - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43203394 - Feb 2025 (3 comments)
A three month review of kagi search and the orion web browser (2024) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42652125 - Jan 2025 (160 comments)
Orion Browser by Kagi - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38441139 - Nov 2023 (188 comments)
Orion Browser 0.99.126.1 Release Notes: Orion+ Lifetime License Now Available - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38088208 - Oct 2023 (3 comments)
Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31584791 - June 2022 (201 comments)
My next main browser: a review of Orion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30610651 - March 2022 (149 comments)
Orion is a new WebKit-based browser for Mac - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28799049 - Oct 2021 (184 comments)
The iOS browser is buggy as all hell: the jump to top click around the notch stops working regularly, reflow/layout breaks throwing all the buttons and url input off screen, the entire page just go blank if it’s too long (like an HN post with 1k+ comments) necessitating a switch to Safari, and on and on. I have to restart Orion multiple times a day and switch to Safari on a regular basis. I just had to do it right now because the “Add Comment” button didn’t work!
That said, I will continue to be an ultimate subscriber because their search engine feels feature complete. Although I appreciate the small features they’re adding like the @ symbol to go along with bangs, as long as that core product doesn’t get enshittified I’m happy. The Kagi team is doing great work!
I hope it's improved now.
The general “chrome” of the app is unfortunately a buggy mess regardless of extension config.
I still think it’s easily worth it because for some critical sites it adds so much value. I just accept I’ll have to force quit a few times a day.
Also, PSA, extensions don’t automatically update on desktop.
I see an "automatic updates" checkbox now in the extensions management window
other notes:
- Love the discussion of features instead of vibes
- Even though I don't understand the comparison table, I appreciate the attempt at quick summary.
- I'm not even a fan of Kagi, if anything I'm mildy opposed. But "a browser with less ads / more privacy" may legitimately win me over.
I can see the theory. First-party ads should (but very much could not) be more privacy friendly. Tracking the user becomes difficult because you need to convince people to add your tracking coda to their website without incentives like Ad payments. So you most likely have to tune ads to what is displayed on the page, ultimately making the page and the user's attention products (which is strictly superior to the entirety of the user being the only product).
3rd party asd - 'hosted' on third party sites
Orion blocks both by default (Kagi's whole game is anti ad-tech), Brave just 3rd party ads by default.
The community might even help cleaning it. Documentation might or could come at some point in the future.
I’m a happy user, no real issues encountered.
The biggest annoyance I had with Safari were sites that would autoplay videos with sound.
Orion bring uBlock origin, this is game changing
Posted from Orion RC.
Sigh. I really liked 1P, but they’re walking a road I don’t want to follow.
Is there another way?