Kagi is ending development of Orion for Linux and Windows and open-sourcing both so the community can carry them forward. Our small team will now focus fully on making Orion for macOS and iOS faster, more stable, and more capable.
Yeah I dont see this succeeding. Making browsers is very complex and needs a big team to work on it to keep it secure and up to date.
Konqueror and Gnome Web are both WebKit browsers, and both have infrequent updates. A third WebKit browser without a substantial project isn’t going to get far.
For all its problems, Mozilla is a big organisation supporting the development of Firefox and Gecko. Chromium is forever compromised by Google, but is a well funded project.
WebKit itself is well maintained by Apple and the other co sponsors. But a browser isn’t just sticking a GUI around an engine. There is much more to it than that, and it requires a decent team to keep it secure and ahead of bad actors.
Fireforx and Chromium and all their downstream projects are constantly pushing updates not because they want to, but because they have to. Konqueror and Gnome Web are not because they are small teams that don’t have the resources to push updates as rapidly as the big projects.
Unless Orion is adopted by a big organisation and funded, it’s dead in the water. There is not an infinite supply of technically capable and interested people in the browser space nor open source generally, and I really dont see there being a big group of people willing to work on something like this as a passion project for free. Downstream forks of Firefox and Chromium are far easier to maintain and even those are huge amounts of effort.
So yeah, good on Kagi for open sourcing it rather than just letting it die completely on Linux and Windows. I’m doubtful Orion is well placed to survive.
Yeah I dont see this succeeding. Making browsers is very complex and needs a big team to work on it to keep it secure and up to date.
Konqueror and Gnome Web are both WebKit browsers, and both have infrequent updates. A third WebKit browser without a substantial project isn’t going to get far.
For all its problems, Mozilla is a big organisation supporting the development of Firefox and Gecko. Chromium is forever compromised by Google, but is a well funded project.
WebKit itself is well maintained by Apple and the other co sponsors. But a browser isn’t just sticking a GUI around an engine. There is much more to it than that, and it requires a decent team to keep it secure and ahead of bad actors.
Fireforx and Chromium and all their downstream projects are constantly pushing updates not because they want to, but because they have to. Konqueror and Gnome Web are not because they are small teams that don’t have the resources to push updates as rapidly as the big projects.
Unless Orion is adopted by a big organisation and funded, it’s dead in the water. There is not an infinite supply of technically capable and interested people in the browser space nor open source generally, and I really dont see there being a big group of people willing to work on something like this as a passion project for free. Downstream forks of Firefox and Chromium are far easier to maintain and even those are huge amounts of effort.
So yeah, good on Kagi for open sourcing it rather than just letting it die completely on Linux and Windows. I’m doubtful Orion is well placed to survive.