> We also chose to build it the hard way by not forking Chromium
Are they building off firefox/servo/ladybird? I couldn’t find a quick answer but the ios/mac Orion is based on WebKit (I guess webkit is further up the fork ancestry than Chromium)?
Kde html -> webkit -> blink (which is the html of chrome). There is a huge work around the mere rendering engine, to the point that its way more common to fork the whole browser rather than just the low level engine.
For most users it's built off of Safari. My understanding is that Orion essentially exists, because Apple restricts search providers on Safari. Most people use it on iOS for that reason, because when you use Kagi on iOS, you cannot use the search engine as a search provider and have to install the Kagi extension, but safari is still probably leaking your searches to whatever search provider you selected (Google, Duckduckgo, etc.). However, no alternate browser engine is allowed on iOS so safari is all you get.
I'm sure Apple's excuse is that they don't want bad actors changing the search provider to some spyware search engine and I'm sure that's true, but for your average Kagi user, it feels like that it what Google's getting by paying Apple billions of dollars to be the default search engine. It's hard to use a search engine other than the 5 that Apple approved.
Skip the rehash and read the official announcement https://blog.kagi.com/update-orion-linux-windows
The thread from 2 days ago with a solid amount of discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49941447
> We also chose to build it the hard way by not forking Chromium
Are they building off firefox/servo/ladybird? I couldn’t find a quick answer but the ios/mac Orion is based on WebKit (I guess webkit is further up the fork ancestry than Chromium)?
Kde html -> webkit -> blink (which is the html of chrome). There is a huge work around the mere rendering engine, to the point that its way more common to fork the whole browser rather than just the low level engine.
For most users it's built off of Safari. My understanding is that Orion essentially exists, because Apple restricts search providers on Safari. Most people use it on iOS for that reason, because when you use Kagi on iOS, you cannot use the search engine as a search provider and have to install the Kagi extension, but safari is still probably leaking your searches to whatever search provider you selected (Google, Duckduckgo, etc.). However, no alternate browser engine is allowed on iOS so safari is all you get.
I'm sure Apple's excuse is that they don't want bad actors changing the search provider to some spyware search engine and I'm sure that's true, but for your average Kagi user, it feels like that it what Google's getting by paying Apple billions of dollars to be the default search engine. It's hard to use a search engine other than the 5 that Apple approved.
Why not open-source all platforms?
Sad :( I don't really care that much because I wouldn't switch from Firefox anyway, and I don't blame Kagi at all. But still -- a shame!