I really like Kagi, but I'm starting to get that same sense of anticipatory melancholy I used to get when I found a really good drug dealer back in the day - this product or service is fantastic, and I'm very happy to be able to give it money, but I recognize this is a short term affair and some day I'll be back to having to search for it again.
I would continue to pay Kagi $10 a month forever for exactly the product I signed up for - I have zero additional product wants or needs, zero additional ambitions for the service, zero things I'd like my money to be going to other than sustaining a high-quality service that solves a need for me. I don't need or want the AI features, I sure don't need a browser, and I'd really like all of this manic product energy to be going towards the core product so I can continue to enjoy it for the foreseeable future.
Kagi founder here. I like simplicity too, but if that is the only thing I cared about I would have never attempted to build a paid search engine.
We started working on the browser before we started working on search. There were many browsers and search engines before us, and all of them failed because you can not compete with an ecosystem company (Google) with a single product. If your customers use your search engine, but then use Gmail and Chrome, your main competitor has means (friction) with them to attempt to win them back over (and you are paid, they are free!) if you ever become more than a nuisance.
This is why it was clear to me from day one that we need to offer a hollistic replacement for big tech for consuming the web - and search, browser and email (yes, we are building that too) account for 99% of consumption of the web.
Yes, it makes our job everything but simple, but without it we will not survive long term - I am 100% sure. (and in the meantime generative AI showed up and made things even more complicated)
I still love my job and the challenges it brings, every single day. While we live as a company in a complex environment we try to remove the complexity for our customers and make high quality products. I have pretty high standards for browsers and have been using them for almost 30 years - and Orion is by far the most powerful option on the market (speed/energy/privacy/features). Inviting you to give it a try.
I’m personally a Kagi early adopter and Protonmail user for all other standard GSuite product replacements. I find this arrangement perfectly smooth and painless, and never once wished that the services that I get from Proton in any way interacted with the service I get from Kagi. It’s not clear to me at all that duplicating the google product spread would be the best way to extend the value to customers of Kagi search.
I think it depends on what you're trying to do, and I also think the landscape is different right now than it would have been 5 years ago.
I'd actually view the browser as a more difficult market to crack than search, because there are plenty of decent free options that have not obviously succumbed to the lure of advertising revenue yet. You're also always playing a "red queen's race" with the browser market where that friction you mention with Gmail and other google properties can be used to push people away from your browser. Similarly, for email, Fastmail and Proton are both fine answers for what to do without Google, and both cover a wide enough spread of the market that I'm not really looking for alternatives (and, relatedly, running an email service _sucks_ - if you haven't hired someone with large-scale public email service experience yet, you absolutely need to do so, because it's one of the worst problems on the internet).
The search market is different - you are, to the best of my knowledge, the only actual paid search engine out there, which means you're the only one whose interests align with mine and the only one who can pursue a product strategy of actually delivering the best available information to me.
This is part of why I'm concerned about dilution of focus - as a dedicated Kagi subscriber, the reason I'm here is because you offer good search aligned with my interests, and that's why I'm going to keep paying you money. The additional products in the pipeline weren't requirements to get or keep my business, and I suspect it's the same for many of your subscribers. I trust you to run your business - you've created a great product that I'm happy to pay for, so you've earned that - but please make sure you keep the search product top of mind and make sure that's a sustainable business.
You indicate wide extension compatibility. This is more of a thought experiment (by virtue of inbuilt adblocking), does - or do you hope/plan for - the likes of uBlock Origin work.
One of the extremely stupid reasons kagi needs to develop a browser is because ios safari prevents setting kagi as the default search engine, so they have to do some terrible hacks to get it to kind of work.
I really hate that you can't set the default search engine easily like in other browsers, or that you can at least easily submit your company to be included in the defaults.
But with the Kagi extension all my searches are always redirected to Kagi on both Safari on iOS and Safari on macOS so I don't really see this as a real blocker as a user.
I understand that this is an onboarding problem, but for a technical user that's really not something preventing me from using Kagi (Like the other comment mentions).
That and Apple anti-competitively preventing non-Safari browsers from using Safari extensions, despite all iOS browsers being essentially Safari under the hood.
I went through the same thing with Dropbox. I loved how simple it was initially: just a folder that syncs. Then they started adding all sorts of "enterprise" and "family" features that cluttered up the simple use case it satisfied just fine for me.
I understand that businesses need to expand and innovate. But it sure is nice to have a rock-solid reliable tool that just works long-term; something that you can depend on without it suddenly morphing into a weird new thing after you've built up skills and processes around it.
Kagi and Orion both entered public beta at the same time[1]. Even if they didn't: it kind of seems unfair to indict this as an additional ambition. It's not as though browsers and search engines have an exotic relationship, and there's pertinent strategic threats that operating a browser protects against.
So I hate Safari with a burning passion and Firefox on iOS isn't much better. Ideally I'd run FF everywhere, but lacking Apple Pay support and iOS anti-competitively locking out extensions to non-Safari browsers make this a non-starter.
I VERY BADLY want to make this my daily driver across all of my devices, but between weird rendering bugs (which are decreasing), janky 1Pass support (which is improving), lacking history sync and the inability to run multiple instances like I can with Firefox*, it has been difficult to make the switch.
I know that Vlad and team are working hard to quash the bugs, so I'll keep trying the betas every once in a while.
*: I know that Safari and Orion have profiles. I prefer to isolate my browsers at a process level, i.e. a separate browser process for work and personal stuff. FF can mostly achieve this with Containers, which I used with the Multi-use Containers extension to create containers based on URL, but things gets weird with intermediate URLs. Safari cannot do this. Orion theoretically can, but I don't think it does right now.
I guess Safari is the only major browser left that is just a browser. Google is an ad company. Microsoft is an ad company. Mozilla is an ad company. Brave is a crypto company. And these next wave of browsers are all going to be infested with AI, I suppose. Apple sells phones.
Apple takes huge amounts of cash in exchange for making a search engine their default and they go out of their way to stop users from removing search engines or adding their own. Those apple sanctioned search engines are effectively paid ads, and apple users end up getting sold to those other ad companies with no option to use anyone else as their default.
SeaMonkey would be good if it weren't for modern websites being well, modern websites, and both Mozilla, with their decision to cut SeaMonkey off most of their infrastructure... and later on PaleMoon with its endless barrage of drama and pandering-but-actually-not to the 'uwu windows xp!!11!1! le fruitger aro y2k' crowd... pretty much screwing them over into irrelevance.
I've used it previously and echo the other sentiments here about some bugs being blockers, but overall enjoyed the experience. Ultimately though, unless they get access to the APIs to auto-fill OTP codes from messages/email, I'm unlikely to switch from Safari
It's interesting that they chose HN as the picture on their homepage; it makes you wonder how much of the company is supported by HN users. Is this site big enough to support a subscription based company that frequently advertises here?
It almost feels like a really clever landing page -- if you click the link from hacker news, it shows you a tailored experience that you'd be familiar with. But looking at the link, I see no parameters that would result in that kind of landing page customization. Also it seems contrary to Kagi's spirit to do that sort of thing.
That landing page is 5? years old. Most of Kagi/Orion users in the early days came from HN (and still do). I am a passionate HN user and I took that screenshot personally.
Once it's fully open source, there are certain expectations and a lot of overhead involved in maintaining the community, governance, etc. I can understand if they delay it while they are still figuring out the initial vision and want to stay focused. There are many examples of open source maintainers burning out due to that overhead, and it seems Kagi might be stretched too thin right now.
If it's not fully open source, there are certain expectaions of fully open sourcing it. Just like they continue to ignore them, they can ignore the ones you mentioned and do not do any community/governance etc. No focus lost.
Also, those many examples burning out are of unpaid individuals, not commercial companies
Readit News
I would continue to pay Kagi $10 a month forever for exactly the product I signed up for - I have zero additional product wants or needs, zero additional ambitions for the service, zero things I'd like my money to be going to other than sustaining a high-quality service that solves a need for me. I don't need or want the AI features, I sure don't need a browser, and I'd really like all of this manic product energy to be going towards the core product so I can continue to enjoy it for the foreseeable future.
We started working on the browser before we started working on search. There were many browsers and search engines before us, and all of them failed because you can not compete with an ecosystem company (Google) with a single product. If your customers use your search engine, but then use Gmail and Chrome, your main competitor has means (friction) with them to attempt to win them back over (and you are paid, they are free!) if you ever become more than a nuisance.
This is why it was clear to me from day one that we need to offer a hollistic replacement for big tech for consuming the web - and search, browser and email (yes, we are building that too) account for 99% of consumption of the web.
Yes, it makes our job everything but simple, but without it we will not survive long term - I am 100% sure. (and in the meantime generative AI showed up and made things even more complicated)
I still love my job and the challenges it brings, every single day. While we live as a company in a complex environment we try to remove the complexity for our customers and make high quality products. I have pretty high standards for browsers and have been using them for almost 30 years - and Orion is by far the most powerful option on the market (speed/energy/privacy/features). Inviting you to give it a try.
Although I have to be honest - even as a very devoted and technical user, I still have no idea what or why assistant is.
Luckily it doesn’t take away from everything else you’ve built.
I'd actually view the browser as a more difficult market to crack than search, because there are plenty of decent free options that have not obviously succumbed to the lure of advertising revenue yet. You're also always playing a "red queen's race" with the browser market where that friction you mention with Gmail and other google properties can be used to push people away from your browser. Similarly, for email, Fastmail and Proton are both fine answers for what to do without Google, and both cover a wide enough spread of the market that I'm not really looking for alternatives (and, relatedly, running an email service _sucks_ - if you haven't hired someone with large-scale public email service experience yet, you absolutely need to do so, because it's one of the worst problems on the internet).
The search market is different - you are, to the best of my knowledge, the only actual paid search engine out there, which means you're the only one whose interests align with mine and the only one who can pursue a product strategy of actually delivering the best available information to me.
This is part of why I'm concerned about dilution of focus - as a dedicated Kagi subscriber, the reason I'm here is because you offer good search aligned with my interests, and that's why I'm going to keep paying you money. The additional products in the pipeline weren't requirements to get or keep my business, and I suspect it's the same for many of your subscribers. I trust you to run your business - you've created a great product that I'm happy to pay for, so you've earned that - but please make sure you keep the search product top of mind and make sure that's a sustainable business.
> I am 100% sure
I'm definitely less than 100% sure. (I'd take a bet at those odds.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43982643
But with the Kagi extension all my searches are always redirected to Kagi on both Safari on iOS and Safari on macOS so I don't really see this as a real blocker as a user.
I understand that this is an onboarding problem, but for a technical user that's really not something preventing me from using Kagi (Like the other comment mentions).
I understand that businesses need to expand and innovate. But it sure is nice to have a rock-solid reliable tool that just works long-term; something that you can depend on without it suddenly morphing into a weird new thing after you've built up skills and processes around it.
[1]: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-orion-public-beta
> I'd really like all of this manic product energy to be going towards the core product
What would that energy do if you don't need anything???
They used to be just about email. Now they have VPN a calendar, password manager, cloud storage and a google docs -style docs thing.
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/03/kag-orion-web-browser-co...
https://bsky.app/profile/kagi.com/post/3ljqsgjmkpk2n
You can signup to get notified at https://forms.kagi.com/?q=orion_linux_news
I VERY BADLY want to make this my daily driver across all of my devices, but between weird rendering bugs (which are decreasing), janky 1Pass support (which is improving), lacking history sync and the inability to run multiple instances like I can with Firefox*, it has been difficult to make the switch.
I know that Vlad and team are working hard to quash the bugs, so I'll keep trying the betas every once in a while.
*: I know that Safari and Orion have profiles. I prefer to isolate my browsers at a process level, i.e. a separate browser process for work and personal stuff. FF can mostly achieve this with Containers, which I used with the Multi-use Containers extension to create containers based on URL, but things gets weird with intermediate URLs. Safari cannot do this. Orion theoretically can, but I don't think it does right now.
The last good browser is Lynx
Then it's doing an awful job because it allows the user to disable everything related to crypto in 3 clicks, to never see it again.
Brave is a crypto company.
Bits 0x02: switching to Orion as a browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44681616 - July 2025 (28 comments)
Kagi Is Bringing Orion Web Browser to Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43302073 - March 2025 (226 comments)
Orion Browser by Kagi: Lightweight, WebKit Based - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43203394 - Feb 2025 (3 comments)
A three month review of kagi search and the orion web browser (2024) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42652125 - Jan 2025 (160 comments)
Orion Browser by Kagi - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38441139 - Nov 2023 (188 comments)
Orion Browser 0.99.126.1 Release Notes: Orion+ Lifetime License Now Available - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38088208 - Oct 2023 (3 comments)
Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31584791 - June 2022 (201 comments)
My next main browser: a review of Orion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30610651 - March 2022 (149 comments)
Orion is a new WebKit-based browser for Mac - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28799049 - Oct 2021 (184 comments)
The community might even help cleaning it. Documentation might or could come at some point in the future.