Safari is bit underrated as a browser, not here but in the wider world. But it has some good features, and normally works fine for my everyday use. And it is integrated into the OS. And it has an alternative engine to Chrome’s and Firefox’s.
Now, with Kagi putting out the Orion browser, it is satisfying to have another Webkit-based browser that is kind of like Safari, but seems better in a lot of ways. I’m slowly working through the features, but it’s free to use so I would encourage people to try it. I like it well enough to subscribe, but don’t have to.
Good to hear about some of the issues. Still in beta, of course. Will keep playing with it as another Safari-like alternative. Thought it was funny what Kagi’s CEO said in the MPU podcast about liking things that are difficult and don’t scale well.
Fair enough. I do care when using it on my M2 MBP with 16GB RAM because with all the other necessary apps (for my use case) running, the memory pressure keeps going to orange.
I have been using it for the past 2 weeks so I can use kagi as the default search. Both the browser and the search work well for me. I don’t see much difference between Orion and Safari except for the vertical tab experience. I have been pleased with the search results from kagi.
This is the most accurate description of Orion. It is ambitious, but with this ambition one comes to expect some things that may or may not fall into the roadmap. For example it has extensive Profile support with better UI than Safari, but Profiles do not have separate bookmark locations (Safari gets this right). Also, vertical tabs are better than Safari’s but Orion does not have folders like Arc or Zen.
Updates are very frequent in the beta but the number of bugs reported in the bug tracker is pretty high. Rather than a fault on the part of Orion’s dev team (I don’t think they are more than 2-3 people) this is a testament to the difficulty of building a modern browser even without building the rendering engine.
It makes for a very powerful alternative browser if you like the direction it is taking.
I think RAM usage and energy usage (one of @MacSparky’s common gripes about Chrome) are fine points to raise, but if everything else works, your password extension works wonderfully, your other extensions are there, and they work too, all of your bookmarks are there for you to find them, you know all of your shortcuts, and they always work, then that browser is a good browser for you … Then you tweak energy and RAM usage on the various platform. Currently, I’m on an 64 GB M2 Studio, so I’m less worried about RAM and energy, but when I take my old intel 2019 MBP out, sure, I worry a little about RAM (and make sure it is plugged in, so I don’t worry about energy
I do find Orion to be notably faster than Safari. And Orion’s vertical tab implementation is more built out.
But I like the safety of iCloud Private Relay, as well as autofill of 2FA codes from Messages. And, in macOS 26 (per Safari Technology Preview), the vertical tabs in Safari are gaining some nice QOL updates, bringing it closer to parity with Orion.
And, as others have said, Orion can be buggy. I’ve never gotten 1Password to “disappear” into Orion like it has for Safari.
So I pay for Kagi, and love Orion, but stick with Safari
Good choice! I settled on Firefox as my primary browser earlier this year. The plethora of features, notably multi account containers, tags, notes, and extensions , multi platform support, made the choice easy for me.
They evidently added new ai tools that I haven’t had time to test yet, so that could be another plus.
Memory has never been an issue for me, especially now that my new Mac has 48 gb of RAM.
