I want to love you, Orion by Kagi. I really do

A couple of months ago, I stumbled upon a new search engine that for the price of ~12$/month would give you a better search experience. I was immediately drawn to the idea of not having to put up with the vast amounts of ads now found in Google Search, and after trying out their free plan, I quickly became a paying customer of Kagi. And after using it every day for some months, I am happy to say it's a very pleasurable experience, and I'd easily recommend it to practically anyone using Google Search a lot.

But Kagi, the company, do more than just search. They have an AI research assistant, an AI news aggregator, a translator, and a browser called Orion. I'm not necessarily opposed to the idea of them expanding into territories that aren't directly linked to search, but I will admit that I've been a little disappointed in the other products they have released. The news aggregator for instance; it scrapes a bunch of newspapers, creates a summary using AI and shows "the most important news" on their own page. From their own about page: "Kagi News reads public RSS feeds of thousands of (community-curated) world-wide news sources and utilizes AI to distill them into one perfect daily briefing. You get every critical perspective and timeline in just 5 minutes. That's it. No endless scrolling. No attention hijacking. Because we deserve better."

What's the point of this? Maybe it's just me, but AI summarized content is absolutely not what I want. Removing every bit of personality from the article — and even the name of the author(s) involved in writing it! — and leaving you with just more slop. If it would have been written by a human, and put some thought and artistry into, it would have been an entirely different discussion, but this is just disappointing to me. Kagi even have initiatives to promote non-AI work and show less AI content in their search so this seems entirely backwards to me.

The other tools seem fine to me, but suffer from being just kind of average from a user perspective. Kagi Maps, Translate, Assistant, Universal Summarizer; they're all just not that great products. I would have loved to see them actually focus on one thing instead of spreading themselves this thin. I won't bother to go into details on each one of them, but try them out for yourself and you'll soon go back to Apple/Google Maps, Google Translate/DeepL/ChatGPT, ChatGPT, and ChatGPT, respectively.

But now, for the reason behind this blog post, and what drove me to this rant in the first place. Their new browser, Orion. Recently graduated to 1.0. I tried using it a couple of months ago, but found it to be too buggy for my taste. This goes for both the iOS and Mac versions. But seeing the recent release of 1.0, combined with the fact that I had to set up a new Mac, I decided to give it a shot, and after only two days, I'm back to chromium again. I really wanted to love it. It's built on WebKit, has support for Chrome plugins (more on this later), and comes with Kagi pre-installed. Which means that it should be quite fast, support my plugins, and not require any plugin to use Kagi. Even though the last point isn't really something that bothers me all that much.

The reality, however, is that it's a buggy, unpolished app. It's not worthy of a 1.0 in my book. It's not a bad product, by any means, but it isn't ready for public use in my opinion.

Firstly, it's not really all that fast. I just downloaded Google Chrome after giving up on Kagi, and it feels more snappy. I don't have any hard data on this, but for me it makes their claim about being fast kind of irrelevant. If I can't feel it, I don't really care all that much. Try clicking on the "theme" button in the top bar. It's slow! There's a noticeable delay between clicking the button, and the popover showing up. Click the theme button to open the popover, and then click on the cogwheel next to it. Blargh.

Secondly, it's just so rough around the edges compared to a browser like Chrome or Arc. Try using vertical tabs and opening and closing the drawer. The animation is slow, janky, and laggy. It seems like no polish work went into it at all. There's no obvious shortcut to toggle the drawer either. Their mini-window when clicking a link is just a worse version of Little Arc. On mobile, scrolling so that the bottom navigation bar appears/disappears causes the content on the page to jump all over the place. That doesn't happen on Safari. The vertical tabs seem like a sloppy copy of Arc; you can pin the tab, but not just bookmark it there. I get that not everything has to be like Arc, but I feel like a lot of people are very happy with how Arc solved vertical tabs, and I think for me at least they're the golden standard.

I just tried to use Disney+ to continue watching Gannibal, and it just straight up doesn't work. It gives me some random error code. I tried enabling compatibility mode, disabling extensions, restarting the browser, but to no avail. Maybe I was unlucky, but this is something I expect to work. I've never had any problem in any other browser. Safari worked first try.

Going back to the extensions, there's one extension that I simply can not live without; the 1Password one. Thankfully it's featured in their own "popular extensions" window, so I thought it should work flawlessly. Surely they would have ran pretty good quality control on these extensions? But no; the extension doesn't let me unlock with fingerprint, half the time the 1password popup just straight up doesn't respond when I click it, it seems to lock itself again all the time, it takes forever to load, sometimes it doesn't show a suggestion, even though I know there is one, and sometimes the little inlay in the input field with the open/close control just doesn't respond. That's all I experienced in two measly days.

So for now, I'm going back to Chromium land. I might give away more information than I'd like, but at least things work.

I hope to one day be able to come back and use it as my daily driver, and my Kagi subscription is not going anywhere.