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Kagi releases alpha version of Orion for Linux

help.kagi.com

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Re: Kagi releases alpha version of Orion for Linux

#221

Post by hellcow »

freediver wrote: post #115
JohnFen wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Requiring it to be open source is not just about trusting the publisher. There are a bunch of other possible reasons, including wanting to support open source as a counterbalance to proprietary software. For me, it's a big deal (although not a dealbreaker) for that reason. If I have the option of two different pieces of software, one being open source and the other proprietary, I'll choose the open source one every t…

Side thought: nobody's ever asked us to open source Kagi Search. Curious why the expectation differs.

Please do that too!

There aren’t great open-source search engines, so I’m moving from one proprietary option to the next. But there are great, open-source browsers already, and I refuse to go backwards.

If a good, open-source search engine were available, I would leave Kagi for it.

Re: Kagi releases alpha version of Orion for Linux

#222

Post by dartharva »

mistercheph wrote: post #120
jwcooper wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The sticking point like always will be media playback (read: DRM/widevine). That is the graveyard where Linux browsers go to die. If Kagi can legally and technically solve the widevine integration on a non-standard Linux webkit build, they win. If not, it will be a secondary browser for documentation reading only. I'm hopeful that some day Linux will have enough users where the media companies can't ignore them. Ho…

You can work around the Widevine issues by pirating the content you're interested in.

But the browser still won't get mainstream and will eventually die.

Re: Kagi releases alpha version of Orion for Linux

#223

Post by bikelang »

edsq wrote: post #179
bikelang wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The built in ad blocker is phenomenal. Only Brave is as good on this front. It supports extensions from both FF and Chromium. It has a really neat integration with Kagi private search in private tabs. Kagi as a company has generally pretty good ethics and respects their users. That’s enough to make it compelling for me.

> It has a really neat integration with Kagi private search in private tabs What's the integration you're referring to here? This was something I was interested in, but as far as I can tell if I enable Kagi Privacy Pass it's enabled browser-wide, not just in private tabs.

Ah - I just did not realize that privacy pass was available as extension to other browsers but of course that makes sense. It’s built in to Orion. You still have to enable it when you switch to private tabs. It’d be nice if it was automatic!

Re: Kagi releases alpha version of Orion for Linux

#224

Post by bikelang »

pzmarzly wrote: post #201
bikelang wrote: post #43

Orion has come an extremely long ways on iOS and macOS. I daily drove it for a couple months maybe a year and a half ago and it had a lot of little rough edges and was slightly broken on a number of websites. I’ve picked it up again as my daily driver as of the new year and haven’t had a single issue yet. It even blocks ads in YouTube now - only Brave did that previously. For me - Brave was the best browser product.…

That's why I hope Brave will eventually launch Brave Origin, a buy-once premium build of Brave, despite the previous large backlash against it from Internet users (especially on Reddit). I like the idea of a paid but well-made, no-nonsense, no-bloat, no-ads, etc. browser, and I feel like Brave developers wanted their browser to be like that, but the pursuit of revenue stream led them to sidetracking into crypto, AI,…

Also I had never heard of Brave Origin before. This is interesting. I suppose it depends on price but I may consider switching to this on Windows and Linux when it’s available.

Re: Kagi releases alpha version of Orion for Linux

#225

Post by drdaeman »

freediver wrote: post #92
hellcow wrote: post #9

It seems weird to run a closed-source browser on an open-source operating system when so many open alternatives exist—I certainly wouldn’t do it, and I’m a Kagi customer. Does Kagi plan to open-source Orion on Linux?

Kagi founder here. Orion isn't open source yet primarily because we're a 5-person team that spent 6+ years building this and created significant IP doing so, and we're not in a position to defend our work against a well-funded company using it as a base (we care very much about the business model of the browser surviving). Restrictive licenses help in theory but enforcing them against a company with a larger legal bu…

> managing an open source codebase of this size would add real strain to our small team

Can you please elaborate what do you mean when you say this? This is something I do not understand. How licensing terms affect your codebase management beyond setting things up so the code is available to users?

Publishing something under a FLOSS license doesn’t mean anything except that you grant end-users certain rights (the four essential freedoms). The rest (like accepting patches or supporting external developers) is customary but by no means obligatory. You don’t have a capacity for it - don’t do it, easy. There are thousands of developers who do that - they just dump whatever they have under a nice license and that’s it.

Unless you’re saying your legal department doesn’t have capacity to handle licensing concerns, especially if you’re using or potentially using non-FLOSS third party components. That I can totally understand, it could be pretty gnarly.

Please don’t be mistaken: Free Software is a purely legal matter of what you allow users to do with your work - not some operating principles or way of organizing processes.

Note: All this said, I can understand that you may not want to grant some freedoms to the end users, particularly the freedom to redistribute copies, because this could affect your plans of selling the licenses. But that’d be a whole different story than codebase management concerns.

Re: Kagi releases alpha version of Orion for Linux

#226

Post by bikelang »

eduction wrote: post #97

Has Orion gotten significantly more stable in the last year? The last time I tried it, on iOS, it crashed a lot.

That was my experience like a year and a half ago too. I switched back with the new year (and also realizing it finally went 1.0 around Thanksgiving). It’s only been a few days but it’s been totally stable so far!

Re: Kagi releases alpha version of Orion for Linux

#227

Post by freehorse »

mikae1 wrote: post #220
freehorse wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Orion does not collect telemetry data [0]. [0] https://orionbrowser.com/privacy

How do you know that? Source is closed. Is a network analyzer enough to determine?

People usually don't compile their browsers from source anyway. And of course, technically, a program can check whether monitoring tools are running and adapt its behaviour accordingly, but this is malware territory and it makes no sense for any reputable browser. Also, technically, one can do that on router level anyway and not have this issue. So yes, I would say that analyzing the network is enough.

Re: Kagi releases alpha version of Orion for Linux

#228

Post by thisislife2 »

freehorse wrote: post #199
lordhexd wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not too much speculation needed as to why: data collection which is then used to enhance both their Search and Assistant products + they can easily start pushing their search and assistant through the platform once adoption is high enough and people who are used to Orion will more easily be convinced to just fork up a little money for continued or slightly improved features/access

Orion does not collect telemetry data [0]. [0] https://orionbrowser.com/privacy

What about their online installers, without which you can't install it?

Re: Kagi releases alpha version of Orion for Linux

#229

Post by jasonvorhe »

freediver wrote: post #92
hellcow wrote: post #9

It seems weird to run a closed-source browser on an open-source operating system when so many open alternatives exist—I certainly wouldn’t do it, and I’m a Kagi customer. Does Kagi plan to open-source Orion on Linux?

Kagi founder here. Orion isn't open source yet primarily because we're a 5-person team that spent 6+ years building this and created significant IP doing so, and we're not in a position to defend our work against a well-funded company using it as a base (we care very much about the business model of the browser surviving). Restrictive licenses help in theory but enforcing them against a company with a larger legal bu…

I can live with that compromise for now. Thanks for the lengthy response!

Re: Kagi releases alpha version of Orion for Linux

#230

Post by dfabulich »

freediver wrote: post #92
hellcow wrote: post #9

It seems weird to run a closed-source browser on an open-source operating system when so many open alternatives exist—I certainly wouldn’t do it, and I’m a Kagi customer. Does Kagi plan to open-source Orion on Linux?

Kagi founder here. Orion isn't open source yet primarily because we're a 5-person team that spent 6+ years building this and created significant IP doing so, and we're not in a position to defend our work against a well-funded company using it as a base (we care very much about the business model of the browser surviving). Restrictive licenses help in theory but enforcing them against a company with a larger legal bu…

> The plan is however to open source when Orion is self-sufficient (business model of Orion is you are the customer and can pay for it - like we used to pay for browsers 20 years ago before advertisers started paying for our browsing), meaning it can sustain its own development independent of Kagi Search.

Orion will never reach "self-sufficiency" as long as you don't actually charge for Orion. Orion is completely free to use. I can donate to Orion+, but Orion+ offers no paid features; it's basically a Patreon. https://help.kagi.com/orion/orion-plus/orion-plus.html

(No major browser has ever sustained its own development independent of a search engine's funding, not even Netscape, which charged $40/seat in the 1990s, with a free "shareware" tier so generous that hardly anyone paid. Netscape was funded by advertising, especially from Yahoo search. Funding browser development entirely on donations to a commercial business would be completely unprecedented.)

What if, instead, you made Orion "source available" to paying customers, but not open source? You could merge PRs only from users who sign a CLA. (Users would file PRs out of charity, for the same reason they sign up for Orion+ today.)

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