Orion Browser by Kagi

I initially began using this as a YouTube player, when they disabled the ability to close out of a YouTube video and have it play in the background on Safari. Since then, I’ve been using it for more and more. It is, quite literally, a straight-up upgrade from Safari in basically every way. I love that there is absolutely no data collection! If the creator adds compatibility with the SponsorBlock extension, my phone-browsing-related pet peeves would all be COMPLETELY solved, just through using a different browser! 🩷

This is a really good web browser. Features are amazing, but the browsing experience keeps that clean/minimal Safari feel to it. It’s unobtrusive yet feature rich for someone who wants a little more customizability and power user support than is available natively on Safari. I highly recommend Orion. I also really like the Kagi support team from an incident in the past where they helped me out and went above and beyond, so it seems like a good company too.

As the title says, I’m about at my limit for the clunkiness of this browser. I love the idea of privacy, but there are just too many issues to forgive at this point, which is a shame. I really wanted the idea of Orion to work, but after more than a year of use, I’m throwing in the towel. Many pages just don’t load properly. Some just cause the software to lock up entirely, forcing me to hard-quit and relaunch. It’s noticeably slower than other options and I find that I often have to resort to other browsers just to regain basic functionality for websites that I have to use. And its password manager regularly fails to work. Maybe I’ll check back in a year from now.