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Orion 1.0

blog.kagi.com

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Re: Orion 1.0

#91

Post by GeekyBear »

sedatk wrote: post #75
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.

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.

Re: Orion 1.0

#92

Post by hedora »

seplox wrote: post #82
ivell wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Recently as in the last 8 years when they overhauled it. It really was slow as heck back in 2016, but the e10s effort really, really paid off in terms of performance. It runs noticeably faster than chrome on my 12 year old laptop. Plus, it isn't riddled with invasive tracking garbage.

Even before then, 99% of the difference came down to whether chrome and firefox were properly using gpu acceleration. (Both could be easily misconfigured.)

I never saw a situation where the actual engine performance mattered in real world scenarios.

These days, all the engines are comparable, except that Google sabotages safari and firefox on its own sites.

Re: Orion 1.0

#93

Post by ndom91 »

I love Kagi, but is this necessary? Another browser, really?

I wish they'd spend their eng resources as a small startup on their legitimately great primary product - ad-free search.

Re: Orion 1.0

#94

Post by eviks »

embedding-shape wrote: post #88
eviks wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsers are slow to startup, that's a common complaint for various browser-based apps, you must've heard that?

Applications that use browser engines for rendering tend to be a bit sluggy compared to native applications, yes. But I don't think a common complaint is that a web browser as a standalone application is particularly slow either running or starting up. People tend to say stuff gets slow once they have a ton of tabs open, which makes sense.

Don't know how common it is, after all, people are used to all the slow stuff out there, maybe they don't even complaint when it's less frequent actions like opening a browser. Though at least for a ton of tabs, there are hibernating solutions, so very annoyed people can at least find a workaround, unlike with the unfixable startup delay

Re: Orion 1.0

#96

Post by jjice »

ndom91 wrote: post #93

I love Kagi, but is this necessary? Another browser, really? I wish they'd spend their eng resources as a small startup on their legitimately great primary product - ad-free search.

Well they've been working on Orion for six years now, so I feel like their effort split between the browser and their other services has been fine.

Re: Orion 1.0

#97

Post by hedora »

makemethrowaway wrote: post #87
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?…

It may not phone home now, but it can do it tomorrow, or it can in be enabled and immediately disabled in some minor releases. Even if people didn't catch those shenanigans immediately it will be evident from the commit history. I'd say opensource forces certain discipline. Also there is point of rugpull, or the product is getting cancelled. Few people will step up to maintain it; atleast until most users migrate to…

As a paying kagi customer that uses orion, I’ll just point out that there’s a reason “enshittification” was the word of the year recently.

Much of it had to do with testimony during the Google antitrust trial. It’s hard to understand how Kagi wouldn’t be ultra-sensitive to guaranteeing there will be escape hatches if it enshittifies. (Your funding model is a great first step!)

Re: Orion 1.0

#98

Post by eviks »

SoftTalker wrote: post #23
segphault wrote: post #17

I've attempted to switch to Orion on iOS a few times in the past and could never quite stick with it due to reliability issues. I'm giving it another try now to see if this 1.0 release gets it over that hurdle. Vivaldi is still a lot more polished than Orion on mobile, but Orion's support for Chrome extensions is a pretty compelling feature. I'm a very happy Kagi search user, so I'm rooting for them to succeed here.

I see this sentiment expressed often here, but I have never experienced a single issue using Orion on iOS. I've been using it for 3-4 months now. With uBlock Origin it actually makes it possible to use the web on iOS.

It's the only browser I remember crashing (not a page, the app itself) from time to time and has a few less critical ones. Like the latest version made it impossible to view what you type in a url field untill a few restarts made it just have the wrong position with the keyboard visible

But also, what ublock origin??? It doesn't work on iOS even if you can install it, are you not mixing it up with their internal adblocker or something else? Just checked and disabled all images, works on a desktop, fails in Orion ios, images are still visible

Re: Orion 1.0

#99

Post by lowbloodsugar »

jeffhuys wrote: post #79
esafak wrote: post #37

What's the bug situation? It sucked last I checked, over a year ago. Is there a way to get a useful visualization like a burndown chart out of their bug tracker? The people who have created it seem unaware that one important task of such a tracker is to reveal the big picture and help answer questions like "Is the project getting better or worse?" They should study the Github Insights tab. https://orionfeedback.org/

Yeah, imo, it’s nowhere near ready for 1.0. I was a big advocate for this browser but recently changed because of exactly this. That, and it’s very slow after having it running constantly, I found myself routinely quitting and re-opening it every hour or two to get normal speed back, or my RAM for that matter. So I’m back on Safari.

It was using 46G of ram the other day. But I prefer it over any other browser so I just kill it every now and again.

Re: Orion 1.0

#100

Post by Apocryphon »

ndom91 wrote: post #93

I love Kagi, but is this necessary? Another browser, really? I wish they'd spend their eng resources as a small startup on their legitimately great primary product - ad-free search.

I think there's just an instinctual draw to building a new browser, partly because so much of our modern software is dependent on web apps. Not sure if SerenityOS has been progressing as much as it originally did now that Andreas is all enamored with Ladybird.
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