> Zero telemetry, privacy‑first access to the internet: a basic human right.
Just because something is good does not make it a "basic human right"; why do so many people now suggest it does?
Orion 1.0
271–280 of 283 posts
Re: Orion 1.0
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You will probably already feel this difference every time you launch it. How many times a day / week / month do you launch your browser from scratch ? It is also a moot point with modern processors and modern OSs. Even more so in Orion's target macOS market where you can leave an app open without any windows open (not minimized, I mean not open at all) , so its ready to go at a click.
> How many times a day / week / month do you launch your browser from scratch ? Personally, around 5 times per day, every day. When I don't browse, I close the browser
Unless you are regularly using all your RAM, there is a very good chance the browser's files are going to stay in disk cache and be effectively instant to load. 100MB is an imperceptible load time difference on a modern system where memory speed is 50-100GB/s or more.
Re: Orion 1.0
#273Earlier 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…
It wasn't just the startup time. They published regular updates to v8 speed which sparked the nodejs project.
Re: Orion 1.0
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been playing Dragon Age Origins recently, and I've been popping into the Steam overlay browser to look up some stuff, which frequently leads me to the wiki. And oh my god, I can't believe how bad the internet is without adblock these days. Every page visit, it pops up ginormous video ads that cover 90% of the web page, and it needs to chug along to get the initial render done before I can collapse it.
Fandom.com is terrible for this.As are their business practices.
Check out Indie Wiki Buddy: https://getindie.wiki
It uses a Free frontend to display Fandom pages, and suggests an alternative non-Fandom wiki when available.
Re: Orion 1.0
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dropped firefox 9 months so after they updated their privacy policy and removed "we don't sell your data" from their FAQ. Besides, it doesn't seem like I'm able to install sponsorblock, ublockock origin etc on iOS firefox. I love using sponsorblock and several other add-ons from both Mazzella in chrome in Orion on my phone.
> I dropped firefox 9 months so after they updated their privacy policy and removed "we don't sell your data" from their FAQ. "Firefox" != "Firefox Focus" Please do not conflate the two. > it doesn't seem like I'm able to install sponsorblock, ublockock origin etc on iOS firefox There are other options though. For example a DoH DNS profile pointing at DNS servers that do that for you (for example Mullvad's `adblock.d…
> Please do not conflate the two
I'm not talking about Firefox focus?
I'm talking about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612
Mozilla has hired a lot of execs from Meta and bought an ad company, looking through a lot of their privacy policy at the time, a lot of it involves rewriting it to say that they can serve you sponsored suggestions when you're searching for things in their search bar and stuff and sharing out some of that data with third parties etc.
Firefox was bringing in half a billion a year for the last decade, if they would've just invested that money in low risk money market accounts (instead of paying their csuite executives millions of dollars in salary and putting the rest on non-Firefox related related social causes), the company would be able to easily survive off the interest alone.
I've been using Firefox since like 2006 and have defended it for decades even when they've made questionable decisions that have gotten everybody upset with them. But this time it wasn't just making stupid decisions to try and fund the company, this time they actuality sold out their own customers.
In public announcement in the above link explaining why they removed "we don't sell your data" from the FAQ, the rationality was that some jurisdictions define selling data weirdly, they cited California's definition as an example but California's definition is exactly what I would consider the definition of selling my personal data.
They're justifying this by saying that they need it to stay alive since they're not going to be getting money from Google anymore, but I argue that you shouldn't sell out your customer base on the very specific reason anyone would choose you. I would rather pay a monthly fee to use Firefox to support them, but even if you gave them $500 million today they would just squander it away like they've done since forever so I really don't have any solution I can think of which frustrates me.
It's absolutely Firefox that I'm trying to avoid completely at this point.
> There are other options though. For example a DoH DNS profile pointing at DNS servers that do that for you (for example Mullvad's `adblock.dns.mullvad.net` DNS servers
DNS adblock doesn't automatically skip sponsored segments of videos like sponsorblock does.
Re: Orion 1.0
#276Re: Orion 1.0
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
(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.
Sure :) 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 op…
Thank you!
Re: Orion 1.0
#278> 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.
People switch browsers because they are accidentally tricked by a dark pattern in Windows 11 to do so.
Re: Orion 1.0
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, except it's pure bullshit. I'm actually a tiny bit irritated they worded it like this because it's insultingly misleading. "From day one, we made the deliberate choice to build Orion on WebKit, the open‑source engine at the heart of Safari and the broader Apple ecosystem." Chromium's Blink is based on Webkit and was for YEARS. While Blink and Webkit had some major differences now, it's not Webkit that's the bet…
> …it's not Webkit that's the better core now. I'm curious about your definition of "better". It's nice that Google is catching up to Safari on Speedometer benchmarks (Blink was 20% slower a year ago), so at minimum one can appreciate Safari for being the mechanical hare that triggers Google's prey instinct. Bun chose WebKit's JavaScriptCore for performance reasons. Safari's supposedly-poor support for web standards…
Amongst many other things, I need to deal with web sites and webapps, and without fail Safari users are the ones who hit the most bugs. Sometimes to the point I'll straight up state ahead of time that we will not spend extra time supporting Safari on MacOS. If it's propaganda, then it's incredibly effective.
Re: Orion 1.0
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
> …it's not Webkit that's the better core now. I'm curious about your definition of "better". It's nice that Google is catching up to Safari on Speedometer benchmarks (Blink was 20% slower a year ago), so at minimum one can appreciate Safari for being the mechanical hare that triggers Google's prey instinct. Bun chose WebKit's JavaScriptCore for performance reasons. Safari's supposedly-poor support for web standards…
> Safari's supposedly-poor support for web standards is mostly Google propaganda. I don't think that users "mostly" agree. Safari's market share on macOS craters compared to Chrome: https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-20... Google propaganda or not, Mac owners aren't sticking with this "superior" preeinstalled browser tech. And I get it, as a Linux user I find WebKit intolerable compared with Bl…
> Mac owners aren't sticking with preinstall...
Installing Chrome on MacOS is a cargo cult thing. Devs tell everyone to install Chrome, and everyone tells everyone else to install Chrome. (Except some devs who tell some friends to install Firefox.)
Zero devs say install Safari, it's already there. And there's no hip narrative for just using what's there even though it saves energy, protects privacy, seamlessly works across devices, and more.
Safari's problem: it doesn't signal tech savvy (Chrome) or anti-establishment (Firefox).