Introducing Kagi and Orion: privacy-centric search and web browsing

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I'm switching from Safari+Brave to Orion, a privacy-centric web browser from Kagi 🔒 Orion feels like a native Apple browser—it's built on Webkit, syncs tabs/groups across devices, AND supports Chrome and Firefox extensions 🤯 browser.kagi.com

Orion offers built-in anti-tracking and ad-blocking technology 🚫 It's also a zero-telemetry browser, meaning no browsing data leaves your browser. We gotta take privacy seriously 👌🏻

Orion is still in beta, but I'm enjoying it so far! It's not perfect, but it's *really* good. Like, shockingly good. Do you know what else isn't perfect? Safari. Brave. And every other browser.

I encourage you to check it out. I'm a hard sell when it comes to "indie" web browsers, but I've been enjoying it for the past two days 😅 It even migrated my Safari tabs 💯 Browsers like Opera and Vivaldi never stuck with me for whatever reason, but maybe Orion will?

While I loved the Chrome/Brave ecosystems, I recently switched to Safari and Brave because of the *tight* native integration with Safari and Apple devices. Safari syncing is great, but the dev tools suck. Brave has filled in that gap 🦁 twitter.com/KeenanPayne_/status/1524103421845925888

But Safari just isn't good—it's annoyingly buggy for how many resources Apple could afford to allocate towards building something great 🤦🏻‍♂️ And don't get me started on the state of web browsers for iOS... Corporate monopolies don't produce good results.

What about Kagi, the company behind Orion? They're a privacy-focused search engine built atop a subscription model where you pay so they DON'T sell your search data 🙅🏻‍♂️ kagi.com

Why pay for a search engine, you ask? Because it creates an incentive structure for search engines *not* to sell your data 🔁 Incentive structures (along with oversight and regulation) must be in place for personal privacy to "make sense" for online businesses. Money talks 💰

Kagi has lots of features that make it stand out from mainstream search engines while standing strongly alongside other privacy-focused options like DuckDuckGo. It offers ways to focus and filter search results while being zippy quick and customizable 🏎 blog.kagi.com/kagi-features

So I'm switching from Brave Search+Google to Kagi. Two days in—so far, so good! Brave Search is buggy but generally provides good results. DuckDuckGo generally doesn't produce ideal results for me. I frequently fall back on Google 💁🏻

I enjoyed this article from @shortformernie on @readtedium about Orion 👍 (Tedium is a dope website with great content and a fun vibe, btw—just look at that social image) tedium.co/2022/01/19/orion-web-browser-macos-kagi-profile/

Kagi and Orion are led by @vladquant, a longtime tech executive and startup founder. I love his dedication to making software that's pushing forward browser and search engine privacy 🙏🏻

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: typefully.com/KeenanPayne_/4JP6d2Z