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Money quote: "In a world dominated by Chromium, choosing a rendering engine is an act of resistance"
I like the direction and keep checking in on it, but while Orion remains closed source there's no chance of it ever being more than a curiosity for me.
(I work at Kagi, but do not work on Orion) There's a lot of different reasons that people ask for open sourcing of Orion / software in general; could I ask you to expand a bit more as to which issues being open source would address for you? I can assume of course, but I'd rather listen to you articulate it, even if it's usual reasons.
tl;dr: I'm a tinkerer, an idealist, and someone who wants to retain control over my digital life and deny influence over it to the likes of Google, Apple, Meta, et al. at pretty much all costs, and there are absolutely good enough open source options that I couldn't bring myself to use a proprietary browser unless I absolutely have to.
To elaborate…
First off, there are a few reasons I always prefer to use open source software:
- I like being able to open things up, see how they work, chops bits off them, attach other things too them, use them in unexpected ways and general use (and abuse) them however I see fit. After all, I can do that with all the physical stuff I own, so why not the digital stuff too…?
- Code costs nothing to copy and is trivial to copy perfectly. This means that the potential compounding benefits of everyone sharing not only their complete software products but individual libraries, algorithms, and solutions to common (and not-so-common) problems are huge. When we use and contribute to open source software we help build those benefits for everyone.
- Closed source code is always open to being abandoned or moving in a direction we don't care for with nothing we can do about it. When it's open source, the question is "will I submit a PR", or "will I maintain a fork" (even if just for me). When it's closed, the question is "will I build a replacement". These are not the same category of thing! I can start running a fork any time[0]. Building a replacement may take months or years, if it's even feasible. But there are individuals who run their own fork of my favourite text editor (Helix).
- I'm a big believer in the value of communities and efforts made primarily for the benefit of one's community rather than financial gain. Open source can act as a kind of insurance against the latter.
Secondly, I think this is all uniquely important for browsers because the web is so dominant and it's therefore so important to me (and I think to Kagi's mission) to protect that platform for everyone, for all time. Even though Chromium and Webkit are open source, Google and Apple exert huge influence and control through their ownership of Chrome and Safari. Firefox is better but even that project is not free of Google's influence, which is steadily making the web worse for everyone.
Kagi probably won't be the next Google, in that respect. As a long time payed user of Kagi[1], I really do believe they want to build a good browser that does not abuse an exploit it's users. But Google's motto used to be "Don't be evil", and many of us believed that for a while too. My point is not that Kagi will or is likely to become evil, it's that when Firefox/Zen, ungoogled Chromium, and maybe one day Ladybird and others exist, *I can't invest time, effort, and attention into something that could in theory go down such a path without the community even retaining the option to fork it[2]. This is especially true when using a closed source browser would also simultaneously weaken those more open efforts, however slightly, by subtracting from their community.
So there you have it. I hope that's helpful.
[0] Case in point: I've used Firefox for years. Sometime last year I start using Zen (a fork/derivative of Firefox) alongside it with no drama or fanfare. Now I rarely open Firefox.
[1] Honestly, I couldn't imagine going back. It's a genuinely excellent product and I believe the company is generally doing, and certainly trying to do the right thing.
[2] Just look at the cautionary tale/disaster that is Arc/Dia. For a while I was worried I was missing out on something special. Then Zen came a long and I worried less. Then the whole Dia thing… boy am I glad I didn't invest my time in that.
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Can't speak for OP, but open source allows the community to check for spyware inserted to exfil data to the company and its partners.
As much as I'd appreciate more open source for the sake of transparency, binaries provided on websites aren't guaranteed to match the source code provided and I'd assume most users are pulling binaries versus building themselves.
I don't necessarily have to trust each individual app on fdroid or in the Debian repos. I have trust the maintainers are building them properly, and those people are not the same people developing the core app.
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I wouldn't say it's only speed. I've been Firefox for years, but eventually ended up surrendering Apple eco-system. with Apple silicon, Firefox at least then wasn't sleeping that well, and the tab sync of FF between my devices was also less than I've desired. So performance is general is more like it... that includes not hurting my battery life.
I've used all 3 browsers (chrome/safari/ff) daily doing web dev for years now and I'm convinced Safari just feels faster as a cohesive Mac app, with the animations and what not, but isn't in general when using the internet day-to-day. FF is little different than Chrome/Safari. Also as a dev Safari is becoming the new IE. I've had a whole suite of Safari-only bugs in the past 2yrs and lots of browser crash reports fro…
> 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.
Browsers are slow to startup, that's a common complaint for various browser-based apps, you must've heard that?
> 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.
Orion is faster than Safari on the same Mac. And it isn't rendering speed, but basic UI interface, multi-tabs usage. It is annoying because you see what Webkit is capable of and somehow Apple is not doing such as great job for Mac Safari. The difference is especially true on x86 Mac.
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WebKit is not slower than Chrome/FF, this is just plain wrong, they tend to trade off over the years and over the last 5 years WebKit spent much of the time on top of a significant amount of the benchmarks people care about. It's also by far the most resource efficient, especially on Mac, though Chrome invested heavily more recently to close the gap. Overall in terms of "feel", Safari is hands down the best browser i…
Maybe it's a matter of the websites I use and my specific usage patterns. I've used many browsers throughout the years: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Arc, Zen, Orion. For many years I ran safari because it was so energy-efficient and the integration was absolutely great. I would LOVE to get back to safari!... For my usage patterns, though, Safari is noticeably slower and much more sluggish. I can't really put it any other…
Meanwhile as a daily driver though Safari hands down feels better. Every little thing feels faster from browser open/close, page open/close, tab open/close/switch, scroll, text selection, window resize smoothness, just the e2e experience is so much smoother in so many ways. Yes heavy JS/animations maybe marginally slower, but even in benchmarks it's very close.
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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.