this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2026

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Orion for Linux released in Early Beta (media.piefed.social)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by artyom@piefed.social to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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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

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[–] warmaster@lemmy.world 2 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

The amount of bull is too damn high.

[–] artyom@piefed.social 1 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Are you in Texas?

[–] warmaster@lemmy.world 2 points 12 hours ago

Good luck, wish you the best.

[–] Liketearsinrain@lemmy.ml 44 points 1 day ago

Not open source and VC funded, not falling for that for the hundredth time.

[–] talkingpumpkin@lemmy.world 89 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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

[–] artyom@piefed.social 18 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Not yet but they're working on it:

https://github.com/OrionBrowser

[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

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”.

[–] talkingpumpkin@lemmy.world 24 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

[–] artyom@piefed.social 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

they want the ability to slip in some proprietary components

Why is that?

[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 2 points 1 day ago

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

[–] pienoyer@piefed.social 1 points 17 hours ago

As a Kagi user myslef im very much looking forwards to this! I realise its not within everyones interests but we do need more good browsers these days.

[–] IEatDaFeesh@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Cool, but... what is Orion?

[–] DieserTypMatthias@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] hietsu@sopuli.xyz 3 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Allows uBlock Origin (and bunch of other useful extensions) to work on iOS when watching YouTube. So a godsend.

[–] Bieren@lemmy.today 2 points 18 hours ago

This is the only reason I use it on occasion. UBO for iOS.

[–] boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net 43 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

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?

[–] nobody_1677@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Neptr@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 day ago

And support for extensions like uBlock Origin.

[–] artyom@piefed.social 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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

[–] boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net 1 points 4 minutes ago

It would be good if you put that post in quotes and say that you are not part of the team

[–] Vincent@feddit.nl 8 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca -1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

download the Flatpak build

How about no?

[–] artyom@piefed.social 2 points 14 hours ago

Okay?

[–] artyom@piefed.social 29 points 1 day ago (6 children)

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....

[–] mmmm@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] confusedwiseman@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] mr_anny@sopuli.xyz 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yes. We're talking about Konqueror fork

[–] aksdb@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] versionc@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago (16 children)

It's worth noting that Kagi, the company behind this browser, is sponsoring the Russian war against Ukraine through its business with Yandex.

https://web.archive.org/web/20251201130700/https://old.reddit.com/r/SearchKagi/comments/1gvlqhm/disappointed_in_kagis_decision_to_integrate_yandex/

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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?

[–] versionc@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Kagi pays Yandex to use their API.

Yandex represents about 2% of our total costs and is only one of dozens of sources we use.

https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integration-due-to-the-geopolitical-status-quo/19

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 day ago

Well that's not great :(

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[–] Ghostie@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I’ve been experimenting with this browser on my Mac devices. It still needs some work but it’s worth watching to me. Definitely needs to get on that open source aspect that they have planned before I consider it a possible daily driver.

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