Thoughts on Kagi's Orion Browser vs. AI Browsers
Kagi's Orion browser hits 1.0:
In a world dominated by Chromium, choosing a rendering engine is an act of resistance.
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. It gives us:
A high‑performance engine that is deeply optimized for macOS and iOS.
An alternative to the growing Chromium monoculture.
A foundation that is not controlled by an advertising giant.
I've used Kagi for a handful of years now, paying $10 a month for web search that has really been a helpful return to finding good content on the web. Orion's been one of Kagi's tool I've gone back-and-forth on using, finding some usefulness but always returning to Safari for its overall embeddedness in the Mac ecosystem. Simple things like autofilling codes from text and email, native integration with Apple passwords (which works great for me), and its general stability were always reasons I went back.
Orion has, in the past, had random bugs and issues pop up (things like programmable buttons disappearing completly) but has been a steady browser otherwise. I'm hopeful this 1.0 makes it more stable. A lot of people found the ability to use Chrome and Firefox extensions to be the best feature of the browser, but that's never been a priority for me. And, I found those extensions to work marginally well but not great. Sometimes they even stopped working.
I paid for the lifetime Orion+ to support them years ago and hope that the browser has fixed some of its small annoyances that were occurring the last time I used their browser some months ago.
One thing I do appreciate about Kagi is their approach to AI, seeing it as something useful but not wanting to immediately jump into implementing it into every area of life. I tried ChatGPT Atlas alongside a 30-day free trial a month ago when it released to see where things stood, and mostly came away from it seeing that it's the new Google. All of its AI features are novel, at best, and seem to be geared more towards creating the foundation for an ad-revenue generator than anything else. I didn't find Atlas' features to be good enough to switch and become the product for ChatGPT. Mostly, their approach to using ChatGPT as the search engine never got past my initial skepticism, even though I feel that method is the best way for me to consume information.
I use Kagi to ask questions and seek general info using their Quick Answer function a lot. They improved that recently by offering the ability to take that output into Kagi Assistant to continue the conversation, whereas before you were stuck with the initial output alone. The sources that Kagi uses are better and more abundant than the sources I found in ChatGPT's search function, giving me a a better sense of trust. I could always run through the links brought up in the general search with Kagi to verify everything; ChatGPT doesn't put much effort into helping me verify their info.
Implementing AI into the browser could be done more thoughtfully than Atlas allows. I haven't been a fan of Chrome because I haven't been a fan of Google for their privacy-invading ad business. However, I am interested to see where AI browsers go from here since they are most likely the next step of online engagement. I'm not against the evolution, but I'm not a fan of the business model.
Kagi feels more simple and useful to me. I'm hoping Orion starts to feel that way too.