Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Orion 1.0

blog.kagi.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 283 posts

Re: Orion 1.0

#111

Post by butz »

have_faith wrote: post #16

> Most people switch browsers for one reason: speed. Is that true? Maybe it is and I'm out of the loop but I can't remember the last time someone complained about browser speed. The bottleneck seems to be website bloat more than anything else. Would love to see this argument quantified.

Nowadays users switch browsers to escape from AI nonsense. But in all seriousness, just enabling an ad-blocker significantly increases the speed of the browser, because, as you correctly noticed, website bloat is the largest bottleneck. And usually "raw" website content is only small fraction of all other stuff that gets loaded from various remote sources to show you ads and track you better. And to take speed point even further - disabling JavaScript does wonders to website speeds, you won't believe how quickly some websites are loading. Logging in to banking website might not work at all, though.

Re: Orion 1.0

#113

Post by d1sxeyes »

wyldberry wrote: post #103
zipping1549 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless it's ungodly slow, to the point where it's beyond being noticeable, speed is the last thing I care about when it comes to browser. Most of the options available are reasonably fast and differences are not huge enough.

Gentle reminder that if you're commenting on hacker news articles you are likely the outlier in the "why people switch browsers" reasoning. Friends and family constantly surprise me with their tech choices and how they interface with the digital world whenever I'm home on holidays.

“My friend told me Chrome was faster”

Re: Orion 1.0

#114

Post by yannickburky »

butz wrote: post #111
have_faith wrote: post #16

> Most people switch browsers for one reason: speed. Is that true? Maybe it is and I'm out of the loop but I can't remember the last time someone complained about browser speed. The bottleneck seems to be website bloat more than anything else. Would love to see this argument quantified.

Nowadays users switch browsers to escape from AI nonsense. But in all seriousness, just enabling an ad-blocker significantly increases the speed of the browser, because, as you correctly noticed, website bloat is the largest bottleneck. And usually "raw" website content is only small fraction of all other stuff that gets loaded from various remote sources to show you ads and track you better. And to take speed point…

Orion already weighs 100 MB less than Chrome. You will probably already feel this difference every time you launch it.

Re: Orion 1.0

#115

Post by sedatk »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #85
sedatk wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was true, and it was what made Google Chrome popular in the first place. Internet Explorer and Firefox were dead slow to start at the time while Chrome started instantly. We just don’t know how bad slow browsers can be because all others have caught up.

That was a funny period of time because you could very transparently see the clear application of a corporate team that was tasked with improving the “startup speed KPI”. During that time IE startup time went from a dozen or so seconds to also instantaneous. It was even faster than chrome sometimes. But that was just the startup. The application wasn’t ready to accept any user input or load anything for another 10 or…

Google did a great job communicating Chrome's improvements over speed (both with startup and prefetch) and reliability (isolated and sandboxed tabs) during its launch. When you saw it, you knew that it was basically game over for any browser that had chosen to stagnate until then. They destroyed the competition.

Re: Orion 1.0

#116

Post by Me1000 »

dinodev90 wrote: post #52
MrAlex94 wrote: post #21

I hope I don't come across too harsh in my criticism here, but this is in my wheelhouse and I like to keep tabs on the privacy browser market in comparison to Waterfox. > A bold technical choice: WebKit, not another Chromium clone I don't find this a bold technical choice at all for a macOS only browser? I think this would be more impressive if it was Windows as well, as back (maybe ~5 or so years ago) when I was inv…

Orion Tech Lead here: Thank you for your patience — the issue has now been fixed. Please try updating now :)

Hi! Congratulations on the launch. Is your intention to ship using WebKit on Window and Linux too?

Re: Orion 1.0

#117

Post by tiltowait »

e12e wrote: post #102
z64 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust with regards to...? Orion doesn't have any telemetry, doesn't force any updates on you, doesn't require any account. You can audit the application's behavior with standard tools to verify that it isn't "phoning home", etc., it doesn't need to be open source to do that, nor would making it open source obviate auditig the final executable anyways. What do you perceive as the risk to "trusting" Orion in this case?…

Also trust that it won't be abandoned like Opera was.

If it gets abandoned—so what? Switching browsers is trivial.

Re: Orion 1.0

#118

Post by dvno42 »

This looks neat but the biggest question I have and care about... UBO? Not the limited manifest v3 version or whatever it's referred to as, but the full bore block lists like in FF.

Excited to see where this goes!!

Re: Orion 1.0

#119

Post by 7bit »

GeekyBear wrote: post #91
sedatk wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was true, and it was what made Google Chrome popular in the first place. Internet Explorer and Firefox were dead slow to start at the time while Chrome started instantly. We just don’t know how bad slow browsers can be because all others have caught up.

At the time, the argument for Chrome was that Firefox and IE were bloated and their memory requirements were too high. A system with less than 64 Megabytes of RAM (most computers of the time) would have to lean heavily on spinning rust virtual memory, making everything slow. However, since then Chrome has become one of the biggest memory hogs that people commonly run.

Ouch. When computers had 64 MB of RAM, Firefox did not even exist yet.

Re: Orion 1.0

#120

Post by sedatk »

GeekyBear wrote: post #91
sedatk wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was true, and it was what made Google Chrome popular in the first place. Internet Explorer and Firefox were dead slow to start at the time while Chrome started instantly. We just don’t know how bad slow browsers can be because all others have caught up.

At the time, the argument for Chrome was that Firefox and IE were bloated and their memory requirements were too high. A system with less than 64 Megabytes of RAM (most computers of the time) would have to lean heavily on spinning rust virtual memory, making everything slow. However, since then Chrome has become one of the biggest memory hogs that people commonly run.

I don't think lean memory use was the biggest claim Chrome had made. That was the game between IE and Firefox. Google had specifically promoted faster startup times, faster web browsing experience, and tab isolation / sandboxing so a crashing tab wouldn't bring down other tabs with it.
Post reply on HN