The Early Beta Build of Orion for Linux is Now Available!

We know many of you have been eagerly waiting for a chance to try Orion Browser on Linux, and we’ve been hard at work to make progress behind the scenes. After months of building the foundations, we’re excited to share this early beta with you. It’s our first opportunity to let you get hands-on with the new features we’ve been developing.

What’s included in this early beta

Browsing made smoother

The core of Orion is fully connected to the Linux UI, and basic browsing is ready: you can navigate pages, use back, forward, and refresh actions, and start exploring multiple tabs. This milestone lays the groundwork for a more flexible and powerful tab system.

Staying organized and secure

We’ve added password management, history tracking, and Dark Mode and Focus Mode, giving you more control over your browsing experience. Custom search engines can be defined in Settings > Search, making it easy to search directly from the address bar.

Stability and polish

This early beta also brings several fixes that improve reliability - from preventing crashes when closing pinned tabs to resolving freezes in Website Settings, and ensuring new installations allow creating new tabs without issues.

Note:

Kagi Sync and webKit Extensions are still in development and not supported in Beta

✴ Try the Early Beta ✴

You can download the Flatpak build of Orion Browser for Linux here:
Download Orion Early Beta (Flatpak)

What’s next

This early beta is just the beginning. Over the coming weeks, we’ll continue refining tab management, expanding WebExtension support and improving stability and usability.

We’d love to hear from you

As always, your thoughts, questions, and suggestions are welcome. They guide us in shaping the future of Orion on Linux, and we’re excited to have you on this journey with us.
Go to our dedicated Orion Feedback Website: https://orionfeedback.org

Browse Beyond ✴︎
The Orion for Linux Team

What's the benefit of this over chrome or Firefox or any of the forks?

Orion is the browser from Kagi. Notably it is based on Apple's webkit (I think GNOME web is the only other one available for Linux) and supports extensions from both Firefox and Chrome.

Using it very briefly I'd say it's more like Alpha currently....

It's not FOSS, so I couldn't possibly care less. That said, best of luck to you!

Not yet but they're working on it:

https://github.com/OrionBrowser

I used it back when I ran MacOS. I will be giving it a shot on my Fedora machines this week. Keep up the good work!

https://orionbrowser.com/platforms/macos#:~:text=Download-,Main Features,-Focus Mode

Apple's webkit (I think GNOME web is the only other one available for Linux)

iirc one of the options available for web engine in konqueror is webkit - the others being qtwebengine (chromium) and khtml, which is where Apple got webkit from.

The biggest feature on Mac is the battery efficiency of Safari with the features of something like Zen Browser. On Linux I would just stick with Zen for similar features.

So anyone who does business with a Russian company is "sponsoring the Russian war"? Seems a bit discriminatory.

Discriminatory? Are you for real?

Are you? You're discriminating against an entire country, 146 million people, based on the actions of their government?

Yandex is Russia’s Google, sold in 2024 to Russian oligarchs with close state ties, so I’d say it’s justified to criticize this particular sponsorship business

We have wildly different definitions of the word discrimination.

LOL I don't know what else you could possibly call it.

I think the thing to take away from this is that this is the CLOSEST thing to another browser option we’ve seen in a while.

Yes, I’d prefer foss but we’re finally not talking about a Firefox or chromium fork.

To be clear, the best case scenario here is a Chrome vs Chromium scenario, because they want the ability to slip in some proprietary components into their official build in order to play nicely with their paid services.

Seems fair to me, and I understand why that’s a substantial effort if they’re still at basically a PoC stage.

Edit: And for the record, I am much happier paying With Reach (Kagi) with my dollars than I ever was paying Google with my data, so I’m very much in favor of this model. Still, some neckbeards only wanna use software from orgs who are in it “for the love of the game”.

they want the ability to slip in some proprietary components

Why is that?

I was wondering whether this would lead to https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/ getting updated in the near future, but it seems that it might not be updated soon enough for it to be worth checking/discussing often.
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/#minimum-requirements
https://help.kagi.com/orion/faq/faq.html#ossprivacy
https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/orion-1-0-browse-beyond/33290/5

Bullshit if not open source. Like a worse GNOME Web lol

Also, does their Flatpak have a user namespace sandbox? It cant. Do they just disable it, or use Zypak, or something else?

Edit: see the reply on my comment

I'm not sure if I understood this criticism. The Reddit thread links to this page:

https://web.archive.org/web/20251203060750/https://kagi.com/changelog#5340

Our image search became even better with the inclusion of two more sources: Yandex Image Search (widely recognized as one of best image search services) and Openverse (vast collection of openly licensed images). Kagi is doing the hard work so that you don't have to.

Are they financially supporting or sponsoring Yandex in some other way?

To me, this sounds like they added the option to run an image search on Yandex? I use a browser extension for image searches that has a number of options including Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, Sogou, etc., and users are free to choose which ones they want to try searching on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search_by_image/

I also remember seeing Bellingcat (who has done excellent investigative reporting on Russia's invasion of Ukraine) using Yandex tools to gather information because it has information on the region that other English/Chinese focused tools don't.

I don't doubt that Yandex tries to manipulate information in favor of the government in Russia. Rather with the right browser protections, someone can take advantage of their free tools and cost Yandex money without Yandex benefiting from it. It's not necessarily a bad thing for Kagi to let people do that?

Using it very briefly I'd say it's more like Alpha currently....

Is it usable as a daily browser, or should I wait a few more months before trying it out?

Probably not for technical reasons, but for IP reasons: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46554890

Yes. We're talking about Konqueror fork

Well that's not great :(

I'm pretty sure their comment is extremely clear it is not ready for daily driving.

Konqueror

I was curious about what parts of it felt alpha, whether it's the power user features vs basic browsing.

I'll just try it later and report back 😄

No like I can't even load a YouTube video. And it crashed several times.

It's planned to be open source in the future. Who knows really. Just thought it was an interesting development for Linux.

Konqueror

It's closed source so you get to cross your fingers that they don't do anything shitty under the hood!!

Oh, benefits! Sorry I must have read that wrong...

A few months later it is then

Thank you!

Correct. That’s how boycotts work. The people of Russia should increase pressure on their government if they don’t like current outcomes. Nobody is blaming them personally but putting any money into that economy ends up killing innocent people in Ukraine.

The only seriously usable webkit based browsers are on OSX or iOS. So far this looks like a best shot at having a cross platform browser with all necessary features to become mainstream and which is based on webkit.

If that helps erode the chromium monopoly, it's a win.

To be fair, it is not sponsorship. Kagi pays for a service they use. And since this is just one of many sources, this is likely also a relatively small amount of money. If they would deliberately pay more than what they use to "do something good" for yandex, then sure, it would be a much bigger issue.

You would have another browser engine at your fingertips; with all its upsides and downsides. Outside of the Apple world there are no really usable webkit based browsers (even though it originated from Linux).

Yes. Russian companies pay taxes to the Russian regime, and the Russian regime uses that tax money to fund their war. Therefore, if you do business with Russian companies, you sponsor the Russian war.

Just out of curiosity: Should we boycott DuckDuckGo for using the Bing API, since Microsoft is an American company whose tax dollars go toward funding the genocide in Palestine, the war in Iran, and the economic blockade of Cuba?

Still, some neckbeards only wanna use software from orgs who are in it “for the love of the game”.

Nope, that's just you fighting strawmen and labelling people who don't hold your same opinion "neckbeards".

I would be excited for a new FOSS browser regardless of specific features, and I could be excited for a non-FOSS one if it had particularly promising features that are not provided by any FOSS browser. As far as I can see, Orion does not fall in either category.

BTW marketing a product for its privacy (or security) without it being open source amounts to having "trust me bro" as a slogan... of course one is free to trust whoever they want to.

Well, if this happens:

The plan is however to open source when Orion is self-sufficient (business model of Orion is you are the customer and can pay for it - like we used to pay for browsers 20 years ago before advertisers started paying for our browsing), meaning it can sustain its own development independent of Kagi Search.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46554890

I guess the main question is: will they open source it if they feel the need to cancel it? Either way, given that it doesn't seem to have any particularly distinguishing features yet, that there are plenty of quality open source browsers, I'll wait until they've reached that point.

Cool, but... what is Orion?

A WebKit browser that supports both Chrome and Firefox extensions and on macOS it supports also Safari extensions.

When I tried it, it worked great.

Though unlike Gnome Web, this the performance is actually good despite being an early beta.

The scrolling performance using a mouse in Gnome Web just sucks, it's choppy and inconsistent. Though it does feel okay when using a touchpad.

And support for extensions like uBlock Origin.

I think it is worth noting that while what Russia is doing is evil, they are not the only evil players in the game. So many countries are complicit and actively support Israel (monetarily), and most countries do business with USA (mega)companies (like Google, Microsoft, Meta) even with the current regime.

Thanks for the post. Anything that isn't literally perfect will always be shit talked by Lemmy in a reactionary way. XD

I'll definitely try it as a secondary browser.

Boycott everyone! Don't buy anything! Just squat on some land in the woods and live off the land until you die from dysentery!

Nobody is blaming them personally

That's exactly what you're doing. Most govts are guilty of wars for stupid reasons. Better boycott everything, I guess?