A new contender, the Orion browser

AltCode

This isn't exactly news per say anymore, but I wanted to post about here anyways because I think it's quite an interesting browser.

Now, first and foremost, this is a WebKit-based browser, but what's interesting about that fact is that, unlike most other WebKit-based browsers, this one is available outside iOS/iPadOS. The only other WebKit-based browsers I know of that aren't restricted to iOS/iPadOS (and are in fact not available in this platform) are:

Gnome Web/Epiphany for Linux.
The Otter browser (I'm actually unsure if Otter is technically still WebKit-based - the info I found about it was all over the place).

The browser is currently for macOS right now, but they assure that a Linux version is planned next; whether Windows or Android versions will come as well was unclear.

Admittedly, the browser looks almost identically to Safari for macOS right now, from the sidebar to its toolbar customisation, but it really seems to shine in two of the features it comes with:

Tree-style tabs, which can be used in place of traditional tabs on top and seem to be exactly what has been requested in the forums.

Extension support

The browser also implements aa built-in tracker, that seems to do the job most of the time, many features that Safari comes with, and tab groups.

The tab groups come in a similar fashion to Safari, but unlike Safari, each tab group has to be opened in a separate window, making it, imo, a worse implementation of Safari's already not-so-great tab group implementation.

About that extension support...

Now, the extension support is probably the most interesting part of the browser.

Why? Well because it isn't any run of the mill support like other blink-based browsers supporting chrome extensions or gecko-based browsers supporting firefox extensions. They don't even support Safari extensions (and frankly, I don't think they could even if they wanted to).

Oh no, this browser is being built with the promise of supporting both chrome and firefox extensions, on both desktop and iOS.

As far as I know, there is no other browser out there that has yet attempted to support both chrome and firefox extensions, let alone in iOS.

luetage

@AltCode Isn’t qutebrowser webkit based too? And Kagi, the company behind Orion seems to be another search engine business.

guigirl

@AltCode said in A new contender, the Orion browser:

Tree-style tabs

Ooooh, i think my friend might be quite interested to hear this...

luetage

@guigirl Oh come on, imaginary friends don’t need treestyle tabs, they need a host body to possess. I don’t think Orion will be helpful in this regard.

shifte

This post is deleted!

AltCode

@luetage said in A new contender, the Orion browser:

Isn’t qutebrowser webkit based too?

I hadn't heard of that browser before. Having heard of it, this is what I found in their FAQ:

qutebrowser uses Qt and QtWebEngine by default (and supports QtWebKit optionally). QtWebEngine is based on Google’s Chromium.

@luetage said in A new contender, the Orion browser:

And Kagi, the company behind Orion seems to be another search engine business.

Yes, iirc, the beta for their search engine was released at the same time as the Orion browser. It's supposed to be ad-free with a subscription paid, just like Neeva. But unlike Neeva, this one seems to already be available outside the US.

AltCode

@AltCode said in A new contender, the Orion browser:

The tab groups come in a similar fashion to Safari, but unlike Safari, each tab group has to be opened in a separate window, making it, imo, a worse implementation of Safari's already not-so-great tab group implementation.

It just occurred to me that the tab groups implementation of Orion (and Safari) actually shares more in common with Vivaldi's session management than they do with tab stacks. So when you look at it from that point of view, both Orion and Safari have a more accessible and malleable version of session management than Vivaldi, huh...

luetage

@AltCode Vivaldi session management is bad, yes. All work went into multiple versions of stacks and how to control them and display them everywhere, while proper session management could completely replace stacks. But there is no auto‐saving, no possibility to save to an existing session, no way to open a specific session with shortcut and replace it with the current session, etc. etc.

AltCode

@luetage Actually, I don't think a more proper session management should need to replace tab stacks. After all, it is already possible to create a session that may contain multiple individual tabs and tab stacks.

Though I do think Vivaldi's session management could potentially be made superior to Orion and Safari's tab group feature. After all neither can make tab stacks like Vivaldi, and their "tab groups" (aka sessions) can only be comprised of a single window, while Vivaldi's can span multiple windows.

But I guess to reach a similar experience to Orion and Safari, the Vivaldi Team would first have to implement the features you mentioned (and more), which so happen to have their own feature requests on the forum!

And to surpass those implementations, Vivaldi could even implement these feature requests:

Thot

I don’t think that Orion will be a good contender/competitor to Vivaldi. Vivaldi is better and gets better the longer there will be Vivaldi. I don’t trust browsers, but I trust Vivaldi and the people behind Vivaldi, that’s important (Forum included). Orion’s UI looks too much like Safari, and I ask myself, why does it looks so much like Safari? Here is an interesting Insight I found today.

luetage

@AltCode said in A new contender, the Orion browser:

Actually, I don't think a more proper session management should need to replace tab stacks.

Tabstacks are the right answer to the wrong question, that is “what do I do with my gazillion tabs?” People use tabs as bookmark replacement and got too many of them and then need to find ways to hibernate them and order them. But instead of ordering them it would make far more sense to group them into sessions and then load/unload these sessions through qc, a shortcut, a dedicated panel, whatever. There’s no good reason to use a second tab bar, expanding/compressing them, or having tab indicators on top of tabs…

I understand tab stacks are a requested feature and Opera had them too, but that doesn’t suddenly make them reasonable. So yes, sadly sessions will never replace tab stacks, but I do hope sessions will get the same care and treatment as tab stacks already enjoy.

WildEnte

@luetage said in A new contender, the Orion browser:

Tabstacks are the right answer to the wrong question, that is “what do I do with my gazillion tabs?”

For me that is not the question they answer. In my line of work I have to deal with quite a few pages that belong to each other in one topic, and several topics are going on at the same time. I constantly need to switch back and forth between topics, a bit like whack-a-rat but several rats belong together.
In this way of working, sessions are of little use. The constant context switch requires these things to be open, period.

Useful feature but often used for the wrong purpose?

Edit oops derailing thread, sorry.

uvedenrode

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DoctorG

@uvedenrode I guess this place is better for you to ask: https://orionfeedback.org