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Orion 1.0

blog.kagi.com

151–160 of 283 posts

Re: Orion 1.0

#151
post #42
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is. That's why I dropped Firefox.

Have you tried it out recently? On Mac and Android it is now very good. It used to be slow for me, but now on the same hardware it is fast enough that I don't see any difference compared to chrome.

i definitely feel that notion and google ai studio are lagging on firefox and not on chrome.

I'm on a mac if that matters

Re: Orion 1.0

#152
post #77
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single word answer: trust. Y’all seem like nice people but trust isn’t automatic these days.

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?…

It's relatively hard to audit a binary. You can audit the behavior of single runs, you can't nearly as easily audit the behavior of the program itself though. What if it pings only on Tuesdays, what if it does some sort of dns reach out that's a false positive for something else you didn't realize the browser was doing, what if there are platform specific differences in behavior.

The same goes for auditing the final executable. Open source gives two options on that: build it, trust it. The latter may seem 0 gain but, again, it is actually a big difference trying to audit a blackbox for every possible behavior vs seeing what the baseline behavior is supposed to be and looking if any differences occur in the premade binaries. There is a 3rd option: reproducible builds... but I doubt that's a reasonable goal in this case.

I'm not saying Kagi/Orion should necessarily care about providing that level of audibility, just that the response a pre-made binary is as trustable as a binary with its source code falls quite flat.

Re: Orion 1.0

#153

Thank you offering Orion outside the App Store. I am excited to try it. But where is the offline installer? If you don't collect data, why does the "installer", that has already been downloaded from the internet, need to again connect to the internet to download the browser, which is what the "installer" should already be having within it??

This doesn’t have to be malicious, it might check for patch updates.

Good point. The world however has made me cynical, and I prefer full offline installers. One of the (many) reasons is that I also tend to save the full installers, of softwares I like, in case they suddenly disappear from the web.

Re: Orion 1.0

#154
post #77
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single word answer: trust. Y’all seem like nice people but trust isn’t automatic these days.

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?…

Personally, I have some software engineering skills. For me it’s about trust in your development team and product direction.

To be at least somewhat certain of the future, I want to own critical pieces of software, not rent it from someone no matter how benevolent-looking.

While things are well, I want to be able to contribute. There are myriads of minor things that your development teams would never get time to look into. If something is a wart, I might have skills to do it myself and - hopefully - ask you to incorporate my patches. I did that to a few pieces of software I trust and use, and I consider the ability to do this as fairly important, even though I do this very rarely.

And if things go sour, it could be impossible to keep up with long-term maintenance of this complex machinery but I still want that option open too. I want to know that if you folks decide to do something unpleasant to the browser, I’ll be able to begrudgingly take over and still fully own the software at least while I’m investigating the replacement options. Not be at someone’s else’s mercy.

To be persuaded otherwise, I need to be aware about your reasons for not providing users software freedoms and agree they’re serving our mutual interests.

(Needless to say, Orion is a very different product from Kagi Search, which is why I apply different set of requirements. I can switch search engines much more easily than user agent software.)

Re: Orion 1.0

#155
post #77
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single word answer: trust. Y’all seem like nice people but trust isn’t automatic these days.

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?…

> it doesn't need to be open source to do that, nor would making it open source obviate auditig the final executable anyways

It doesn't need to be open source to do that, but it really helps. Ideally you'd publish source and have reproducible builds, so that users could look at the code to see that it's not doing anything objectionable and a handful of people could make sure that that code matched the official binaries.

> You can audit the application's behavior with standard tools to verify that it isn't "phoning home", etc.

Can you? Practically? Lots of programs are easy: You put them in a sandbox with zero network access, or very carefully restricted access, and that eliminates 90% of likely problems. But this is a web browser; it's purpose is to connect over the network, all day every day, to arbitrary, dynamic domains in large numbers, such that I would seriously question whether it is in fact practical to audit in a black-box approach.

Re: Orion 1.0

#157
post #156

Reportedly, current desktop OS marketshare[1] is: - 66% Windows - 18% MacOS - 3% Linux Right now, I can't try out Orion as one of the 66%. [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...

So? Companies are free to choose their markets. For a long time there were a lot of shops that only focused on the Mac.

Re: Orion 1.0

#158
post #156

Reportedly, current desktop OS marketshare[1] is: - 66% Windows - 18% MacOS - 3% Linux Right now, I can't try out Orion as one of the 66%. [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...

I mean they say in the article that the have started on the windows version and are aiming for late 2026

Re: Orion 1.0

#159
post #77
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single word answer: trust. Y’all seem like nice people but trust isn’t automatic these days.

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?…

>Orion doesn't have any telemetry, doesn't force any updates on you, doesn't require any account.

Source: "Trust me".

As another person mentioned, telemetry could be sent out Sundays @ 2:00am, so my use of standard tools to verify that it isn't phoning home on a Tuesday afternoon is useless. This is just one isolated example.

>it doesn't need to be open source to do that, nor would making it open source obviate auditig the final executable anyways.

Trust is not a single bit that is flipped from "Fully trust" to "Fully distrust". Things become more trustworthy when the source can be reviewed, and less trustworthy when an employee says "We don't do this, trust us, but we're keeping the box closed because ~reasons~".

In my eyes, Kagi has a lot of trust-building to do, despite being the darling child that can do no wrong in many HNers eyes (for whatever reason).

Re: Orion 1.0

#160

> 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.

I have definitely switched in iOS to orion for the support of firefox and chrome extensions. Have not the slightest idea how different browsers in mobile compare in speed. But if it was abysmally slow I would have had seconds thoughts about it probably.

On iOS its all WebKit anyway (for most regions).
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