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Orion is a new WebKit-based browser for Mac

browser.kagi.com

121–130 of 190 posts

Re: Orion is a new WebKit-based browser for Mac

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raymond Hill created the uBlock ad blocker, and now maintains uBlock Origin ( https://github.com/gorhill )

Why is Raymond Hill not working on uBlock anymore? Why is there uBlock and uBlock Origin?

He stopped working on it and gave it away to someone else, who promptly used it to raise "donations". This led him to decide to fork back the project under the name "uBlock Origin".

Re: Orion is a new WebKit-based browser for Mac

#122

I don't see any mention of developer tools, but in case anyone working on this is here, that's something that would probably be interesting to the HN crowd. Since the home page has a screenshot of HN, I'm guessing devs are the target market.

It has ‘em (as seen in Safari). You can put the inspector button in your header bar through the customization menu and I think they’re pretty good. One thing to note is that even with caching disabled in the dev tools it caches aggressively, which is why I don’t usually use it for development. But that’s why it’s a beta :-)

As a WebKit web browser, Orion ships with the same Web Inspector. You can disable resource caching from the "Network" tab, by clicking on the cylinder-looking icon in the right (it'll tell you that it disables caching if you hover over it.)

Re: Orion is a new WebKit-based browser for Mac

#123
post #91

Is there any crossplatform WebKit browser?

Not any more to my knowledge. But if Orion becomes a success there might be one! (founder here) Current situation is - WebKit works great on Linux so that is not a problem. We've built WebKit on Windows too and while it works, it's not great. We are talking few developer-years of effort there (performance is main issue).

Why does WebKit perform poorly on Windows?

Re: Orion is a new WebKit-based browser for Mac

#124
post #46

A bit of a tangent, but not that much: I loathe the new Safari “tabs”, with as much scare as you can get in those scare quotes. But, I still can’t leave Safari be, as I appreciate the history and Keychain sync with my iOS devices. It’s that tight macOS/iOS integration that makes me stay on Safari, along with the relatively lighter energy usage versus Chrome. This looks nice in terms of using native UIKit elements (pr…

On iOS, Kagi is UIKit/SwiftUI and uses the system WebKit, yes. On macOS it's AppKit and ships a mildly forked WebKit to better support web extensions.

Re: Orion is a new WebKit-based browser for Mac

#125
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not any more to my knowledge. But if Orion becomes a success there might be one! (founder here) Current situation is - WebKit works great on Linux so that is not a problem. We've built WebKit on Windows too and while it works, it's not great. We are talking few developer-years of effort there (performance is main issue).

Why does WebKit perform poorly on Windows?

I do not know, but in Windows tests it performed about 30% worse than Blink (Chromium).

Re: Orion is a new WebKit-based browser for Mac

#126

Hey everyone, I am the founder behind Orion, bootstrapping the project. Started working on it three years ago with a small team just to see if it would be possible to build something like this from scratch and we just kept going. Orion is today a daily browser for a few dozen beta-testers and it warms my heart to see that we got that far considering the competition. Few questions about Orion answered that I see pop p…

This looks like a very interesting project! Do you have plans to support anything like Firefox Containers? They're a really fantastic feature for the privacy-conscious.

Yes, on our roadmap. Trying to solve for UX and reduce complexity.

Imagine a menu:

Open in New Tab

Open in New Private Tab

Open in New Container

Open in New Window

Open in New Private Window

Open in New Container Window

+ Tab groups! Oh my...

It is a bit too much, needs to be simplified.

Re: Orion is a new WebKit-based browser for Mac

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Kagi - Better Web for our Children" Well... It's a pass from me. Anything claiming something is "think of the children" is at best facetious.

> "Kagi - Better Web for our Children" > Well... It's a pass from me. Anything claiming something is "think of the children" is at best facetious. That's taking it too far. It's really good to "think of the children," it's just that we have to be mindful of when that's used as a smokescreen to distract from a particular policy's highly objectionable consequences. That kind of expression also has multiple senses (e.g.…

Thanks, yes, that was the intent - and I realize it did not turn out to sound in the best way.

I thought we'll have time to figure it out before we launch but it did end up getting featured on HN unexpectedly.

The core of the idea is a 'more humane web' and we will be adjusting the messaging accordingly in the future.

Re: Orion is a new WebKit-based browser for Mac

#128
post #46

A bit of a tangent, but not that much: I loathe the new Safari “tabs”, with as much scare as you can get in those scare quotes. But, I still can’t leave Safari be, as I appreciate the history and Keychain sync with my iOS devices. It’s that tight macOS/iOS integration that makes me stay on Safari, along with the relatively lighter energy usage versus Chrome. This looks nice in terms of using native UIKit elements (pr…

Long term Safari fan here. The new tabs have terrible UX but what's worse is stability. Whoever is "at fault" there - don't try to use jira with the latest Safari as it will crash eventually.

Yep. I'm seeing weird bugs with e.g. middle-click-to-open-link-in-new-tab doing what it should—but then replacing it with the blank-tab content a quarter second after I switch to the new tab.

I'm not used to Safari being buggy. It's part of why I've stuck with it for years.

I'm actually kind of loving the tab groups—it's a little weird to me that we have that and the concept of a window, still, and the two are separate, but whatever—but the tab UI itself is really, really bad.

Re: Orion is a new WebKit-based browser for Mac

#129

I'd use this if you can remove all the Apple crap features: - All the crap of AI / machine learning to prevent cross-site tracking that's useless to me in "Private Browsing" mode - just give me back control over cookies (manually and through third-party extensions), and keep Apple away from my data. - Remove the crap "Web Advertising: Allow privacy-preserving measurement of ad effectiveness" code from webkit. Keep ad…

> All the crap of AI / machine learning to prevent cross-site tracking that's useless to me in "Private Browsing" mode

Private Browsing, on its own, can only limit the scope of cross-site tracking to a single Private Browsing session. It does not prevent cross-site tracking within that session. (For example, if you visit two web sites within a Private Browsing session which both use Facebook widgets, Facebook may be able to correlate your activity across those sites.)

Re: Orion is a new WebKit-based browser for Mac

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I count Brave's emphasis on crypto as a pro and necessary for our hopefully one day ad-less future. If you block ads without allowing the ability to donate a token you are effectively stealing from site owners and causing the rise of paywalls and other restrictions on the internet.

> you are effectively stealing from site owners This is "you wouldn't download a car" level argument.

Maybe I could have phrased it better, but the point is site resources cost money.

If no one is viewing the site, it probably doesn't cost anything.

Once people start using the site, it starts costing resources to run it.

Currently, there's two ways to pay for those resources, ads or subscriptions.

BAT allows you to easily take tips and continue the service for free that people expect, without ads.

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