Firefox is still my primary work browser because all the anti-tracking stuff Orion does actually breaks some sites I depend on (well, makes them harder to use anyway), but Orion has become my main and I have lost confidence in Mozilla.
If you want to continue using Firefox as a kind of service to the world or weird self-imposed civic duty, that’s on you. I can pay for Orion and know that there is a company with an actual business model behind it and also not worry about misaligned incentives, or fixing all the tracking and telemetry defaults (only to watch my hard work crumble like when a random Firefox update hosed my settings on my personal machine a couple years ago) because there is no telemetry.
Orion is not a Chromium derivative.
Further, nobody here said Firefox was incapable as a browser. Use it if you like it, but having used Firefox off and on since 2005, I’ve written it off on my personal machines.
John Gruber had the Kagi CEO—Vlad Prelovac—on in December. I yoinked this from the auto-generated transcript in Apple’s Podcasts app:
> Orion is still in beta. We are nearing V1. There was so much to do.
> One thing that differentiates building on top of WebKit to Blink is that for Blink, there is Chromium, which is the web browser app framework. You get the entire browser out of the box. You can just change the name.
> And you have a browser for WebKit. There is no Chromium equivalent. You have to create every menu, every button, everything, which is why it took us six years to get where we are.
> It's basically written from scratch. And on top of that, we also decide to port web extensions, to port API to natively to WebKit. We're doing all these hard things that take a lot of time.
> And I know many people [aren’t] happy to see Orion is buggy. This extension doesn't work. Well, yes, it takes time to do this properly, but we are determined to do that properly.
> And of course, it also has the native ad blocker included and all these good things that a browser should have. But for various reasons, all the mainstream browsers cannot do. And yeah, that's the origin story for Orion.
Notably they have been porting in support for Web Extensions APIs that even Safari doesn’t support. You can see a full breakdown comparing Orion (Mac) and Orion (iOS) vs other popular browsers here: https://kagi.com/orion/WebExtensions-API-Support.html
FF’s legalese may have burned through their last bit of good will, and if that’s the last nail in their coffin let it be a lesson in terminal enshitification and not understanding or caring about your users.
It's more than that. It prevents monopolization of the web by a single company. This isn't like picking a different version of Ms. Dash from the grocery store.
They can push technologies that benefit their ads business (e.g. manifest 3 breaking ublock origin). And the notion "embrace extend extinguish" was practically invented for circumstances like this, of engaging the development community in a particular field of software, dominating it, and achieving leverage to change the way the web works.
>that having a lot of stakeholders prevents Google from unilaterally applying unpopular changes
Google controls commits to Chromium, and it does that with an invite only developer pool almost entirely of people associated with Google. The stakeholders don't have a proportionate hand in the destiny of Chromium. I think you're right that it's maybe better, in the sense that we could imagine something even worse, but that's loo low a benchmark to offer comfort that Chromium is having a net-positive impact on balance of power in terms of who can help you access the web.
And now Firefox has shad the bed so badly with their "we will actually sell your data now" that I don't even care. It can burn in hell.