Yes, it's good, and I'll keep using it for the foreseeable future, but it's not an unassailable lead.
My subscription is up for renewal in December and I think I actually have a decision to make. For now I'm very happy with the Kagi MCP for my research agent. But I'm definitely having a moment of "how reliant should I really be on this company?"
If you try it out, you'll either find a replacement that saves you money, or you'll at least have the makings of an escape plan if you need it later. You'll also have your own comparison data for where Kagi beats a generic metasearch, and if that difference is meaningful for you.
That's because imo there is no way to grow this bigger with a search service. Same for open source browsers, just look at Firefox instead of focusing on bugzilla and push for new web apis, they're trying very hard everything else than can be monetized
Google managed to monetize the everyday person's searches, but at the detriment of everyone that wanted to get nontrivial work done that needs in depth search.
Lots of institutions want quality search. They could index high value things, and sell them directly to businesses, universities, etc.
It is for Google there isn’t much else we are left with
Zen is a Firefox (skin? fork?), and the Firefox community is their own niche (and IMHO, more Linux/Windows-focused rather than Mac). I think Kagi's focus on Mac made WebKit a natural choice, even though Firefox would've been the more platform-independent choice (as in being able to make the one browser for all three platforms, rather than bringing one to Mac, then another to Linux and to Windows).
Firefox has never really felt at home to me on Mac. I've used Safari (and previously Orion) ever since letting go of Chrome for most personal use.
I’d rather see Orion continue to be developed alongside Zen though, because goodness knows we need more non-Chromium browsers.
Thanks for the honest attempt! Hope someone takes the torch and carries it forward.
As other said: the target audience of the Linux version was never clear.
PS: did not test Copilot nor my own LLM accessing another Search Engine's result -- haven't got the headspace for it.
We dont need ad blockers. We need advertiserproof/trackingproof browsers. Like we have waterproof shoes and coats and hats. We could also use some nicer browsers in terms of features.
But what folks who really care about these details should do is simply de-apple, and de-google (and obviously de-windows!). That will get you much further than using a particular browser, but a good browser helps.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see some agentic features in their browser at some point. Their assistant tool is already quite good - it has replaced search for me in a number of scenarios.
I ended up staying because the Adblock is good (search remains good). The browser is fine. It does have bugs and needs to be hard closed occasionally.
I agree on the assistant. It is very capable. I use the Kagi mcp with coding agents and I like the results, but they have done something with their assistant that makes it even more useful.
Bad call, because it's genuinely too hard for someone the size of Kagi, as they've discovered.
There's room for a Chromium fork that has a better reputation than Brave. (I use Brave, and it's great, but I realise many people don't want to use it.)
We need more rendering engines out there in the wild, as the situation with chrome's monopoly is already critically dire.
Mozilla have more momentum, experience, and funding, but still struggle.
I know they don't want more users at this point, but half the things I find out about are through their discontinuation press releases.
I try to see if they got Orion to behave again, but find a bit difficult to trust it as the main browser.
I was very excited about the possibility of having some rendering engine competition on Windows.
If you were Google and you wanted to spread your search engine to the world, it would be fine but such a small company. And the market share would still have been abysmal on the platforms.
Great thing that they release it before abandoning it, truely a great move !
And hopefully they keep making it better on macOS and iOS.
I've done successful, safe cross-platform development at several small companies and it goes just fine. But you do need capable hands at it and some developers really worked their best to sabotage the work platforms due to sheer laziness.
Size of company is irrelevant, not hiring fanboys is the most important part at this process. I wonder how Kagi managed to fail at that.
For me, as battery-efficient as Safari, but with better chrome and access to ffox extensions ecosystem.
The only reason to use Safari is because you're knee-deep in the Apple ecosystem, otherwise something like Chrome, Edge or Brave just makes more sense.
[0]https://birchtree.me/blog/everyone-says-chrome-devastates-ma...
Safari is less private than Brave and does not have the breadth of extension that Chromium browsers (and Firefox) do. So again, the only reason to really choose Safari is if you're completely in the Apple ecosystem.
I use Orion because it's not a product of Apple or Google. There's no reason the browser should be a product of the same company who made the OS.
Developing internally initially, as opposed to making it open source, was probably the only practical way for a small team with a specific goal to get there. I don't see any problem turning it over to community development for secondary platforms. If it gets adoption, great. If it fizzles out on linux and windows, nothing is lost.
I used it regularly for almost a year, eventually got off because of some UI bugs that came up and because the Safari dev tools feel so clunky/need relearning compared to Chrome & FF.
This is not gonna work because Kagi is not free to use
So, in my opinion, there wasn’t a really good reason to wait for uBlock to land on Apple’s platform.
The ad blocking aspect never seemed like a flagship reason to use Orion if you ask me.
Some of the other features are.
In other words, as you say, exactly.
I have no idea if it's a good or bad or I'd like it or not. I never even considered trying. I don't mind that it exists. I don't think kagi are doing anything bad with it. But I also just have no interest in even trying it. Presumably it's good for soneone but for me (a paying kagi customer linux user) it's almost like it's invisible. A probably benign, utterly uninteresting thing.
I don't use any of their AI features either. I hope they cost extra seperately so that I'm not paying for that stuff I'm not using but I suspect I probably am.
Also, All the AI integration into the product is gated by a single setting.
The iOS codebase is the only one that potentially has any value to the OSS community; this kind of "enjoy our garbage!" source release really irks me.