> A bold technical choice: WebKit, not another Chromium clone

I don't find this a bold technical choice at all for a macOS only browser? I think this would be more impressive if it was Windows as well, as back (maybe ~5 or so years ago) when I was investigating WebKit on Windows, builds were not on an equal playing field[1]. So the engineering to get that up and running would be impressive.

> Speed by nature

Unfortunately, as of 16:40 UTC, I am unable to run the browser (installer?) to benchmark it due to "An error occurred while parsing the update feed.", but I recall 2 years ago when I tested Orion it was the slowest of all the browsers on macOS and Safari had quite a lead. I'd also be curious, being based on WebKit, how much faster it will actually be on macOS vs Safari?

I dropped speed as a focus point on Waterfox after compilation flags started making less of a difference compared to the actual architectural changes Mozilla were making for Firefox.

> Privacy etc

I think comparing to other major browsers such as Chrome the points are valid, but against Safari I'm not convinced it holds up as much. I know there is some telemetry related to Safari, but privacy is a big selling point for Safari as well and I'd be curious to see actual comparisons to that?

Safari includes iCloud Privacy Relay (MPR based on MASQUE[2]) and Oblivious DNS[3] - arguably two very valuable features that a company at a scale like Apple can subsidise.

The entire AI section also feels like trying to have it both ways as well. They criticise other browsers for rushing AI features, position themselves as the "secure" alternative, then immediately say they'll integrate AI "as it matures." This reads more like "we're behind on AI features" than a principled stance. If security is the concern, explain your threat model and what specific architectural decisions you're making differently? Currently Firefox has kept AI out of the "browser core" as it's been put, and I don't see them ever changing that.

Kudos that they have >2000 people paying for the browser directly, but I will say it doesn't excite me to see another closed source browser entering the market (I don't see any mention here of open-source apart from mention of WebKit being open source).

I do realise this is more a marketing post than an actual technical deep dive, but so much is just a rehash of every feature almost every modern web browser has?

I'll keep updating this comment as and when I can explore the browser itself a bit more.

[1] https://fujii.github.io/2019/07/05/webkit-on-windows/

[2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/masque/about/

[3] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3340301.3341128

"MiniBrowser" opened after installing AppleMobileDeviceSupport64 from iTunes and VC_redist.x64, and it appeared to be making network requests, but it never rendered any web content I could see.

Question: Don't optimizers support multiple ISA versions, similar to web polyfill, and run the appropriate instructions at runtime? I suppose the runtime checks have some cost. At least I don't think I've ever run anything that errored out due to specific missing instructions.

Orion adding Windows support (getting WebKit running on Windows again) would be pretty good too.