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I'm a devoted Kagi user and really want to use Orion but keep running into perf issues and jank that frustrate me enough to switch back to something else. My most recent attempt was this past week.

You all seem to maintain a very fast pace of development (the changelogs are always chock full of cool stuff) but the problems I am hitting have remained broken for ages. Some examples include:

* The app hangs for 1~2 sec partway through typing a URL/search, when using the back button, or during other navigation

* The 1Password extension fails to fill usernames and passwords most of the time, regardless of which version I install. It works fine in Safari, Chrome, Firefox.

* Your built-in ad blocking triggers anti-ad-blocking measures on many news/blog sites now, resulting in the entire page being blocked.

I don't know your business, but maybe pausing new features and pushing for stability/perf/quality of life for a while (a la macOS Snow Leopard) would make sense.

No, you don't support Linux. I just tried to download it and got a "coming soon". Please don't post misleading things to HN :(.

Kagi has a good rep; misleading comments like this hurts it.

What about the glaring memory issues that is a pinned thread in your forum? It’s had one comment by a staff member over 5 or so months?

I loved Orion and have been using as a daily driver almost since day 1 including paying for it but now it’s completely unusable. I’ve since moved to Firefox.

The fact that a pinned thread was silent for months concerns me about the future of Orion. It honestly hurts to see.

Why do you have quite a number of glaring UX issues? I want to love Orion, but even something as basic as the tabs theming is driving me away.

By default is it almost impossible to distinguish which tabs i active in some situations. I think the browser automatically tints the window based on the dominant color of the page you are viewing, which means if I am viewing youtube for example, the whole browser windows is tinted a bit darker, in such a way that I can't easily make out outline of the currently selected tab.

Such a bummer for what should have been an easlity changeable behavior with settings: I do not want any tinting, and I want hight contract mode

I will consider Orion only when it is open source.

While you can install the Firefox uBlock Origin extension in Orion on iOS, it doesn't block any ads.

This has been reported for some time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43203237

Could you please clarify?

I never went back to Firefox after they killed the Pimpzilla theme.

Then again, our laptop battery only lasts 1/3 as much on MacOS.

I know, I know. The community keeps pretending this isn’t an issue for the last, hum, 15 years? But it is, and for people that are looking for a tool and not for a statement, it quickly drives them away from Firefox back to Chrome browsers.

Was that the year they fired the Rust team to focus on paying their executives?

Right after they reach at least ~80% of customization Vivaldi offers!

or even since 2002 when it started as Phoenix

https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_...

Firefox and Firefox-derivative browsers have and continue to be seriously sluggish and memory and energy hogs. This should not be swept under the rug.

Even today it is difficult for me to use Firefox, Mullvad, etc. When I used to use them, almost every time my machine became slow the solution was to kill Firefox.

EDIT: It's true folks, I would love to be able to use Firefox as my primary browser. But all my experience with it and I used it for almost a decade) has been dogged by its sluggishness.

Agree. The web is literally unusable without uBlock Origin. It should be a standard browser feature at this point, like popup blockers.

Firefox thankfully offers sync and imports your Chrome data.

Makes switching easy.

uBlock Origin Lite with MV3 works perfectly fine on Chrome. I don't notice a difference to the classic uBlock Origin, it even has a element zapper nowadays.

It's quite possible that we're just not meant to view the web. Those companies that even maintain websites might intend for us to really view things on their phone app. The garbage you see on the website is then not just some parasitic draining of your spiritual health, but a disincentive designed to convince you to stop using the web altogether.

Firefox haven't caved in so far. Why do u think it might in future?

If Mozilla operates from revenue derived from selling www traffic to an advertising company running a "search engine", then it is 100% possible and realistic that Mozilla's browser could be optimised for advertising

Mozilla literally advocates for an "online advertising ecosystem"

At present Firefox is optimised for sending search traffic to Google

Mozilla can only see its continued existence through support from advertising. It does not just partner with advertising compaines, it actually acquired an adtech company

Google has a history of "shaking the cushions" by targeting their advertising customers and Chrome. It's reasonable to forsee that they could also target the agreement with Mozilla, i.e., Firefox

https://web.archive.org/web/20121018180015/https://www.compu...

https://web.archive.org/web/20200805000248/https://blogs.wsj...

Maybe Mozilla breaks its partnership with Google, who knows. But based on a long history of Mozilla advocacy for online ads and working with online advertising companies, it seems 100% committed to online advertising as a "business model" regardless of whether it partners with Google or another "search engine"

It's giving Sony. Similar situation where you have a media business and also make some of the distribution channels including engineering of devices used to consume the content.

The thing is that they shouldn't be able to get away with it.

> Ladybird browser might be our only hope

God help us.

Maybe after few another "we are switching from language X to language Y" blogposts.

Good news is there are many viable Firefox forks currently and I’m sure some of them could take the wheel. It is open source, after all.

It would be a shame to lose the Mozilla foundation/Firefox but it wouldn’t be the end of the browser.

I thought the AdGuard folks were looking doing just that!

I don't, 99.9% of the time.

But when your browser has a 2% market share worldwide, some developers won't bother to test on it. And if your setup is even more obscure (I use Firefox on Linux with an adblocker and third-party cookies blocked and DRM disabled and autoplaying video disabled and so on) making you rare even among that 2%, sometimes sites won't have tested with your specific configuration.

It's useful to have a second browser around, as a fallback when a site is broken. Uploading images when creating a listing on ebay is broken, but I don't have to figure out which element of my setup is breaking it, I can just switch to the other browser.

Some pages do not work in Firefox, so I keep a copy of Chrome around.

It’s a bit like with Internet Explorer which back in its day was also needed for some stubborn sites.

Because Chrome is the better browser, lelz.

Edge user here. For one, chromium is faster than firefox, any given page will load about 20% faster, another reason is edge workspaces feature, I've grown to like it, which seems to be some sort of chromium feature that everyone bakes in weird ways if at all, and I'm still running ublock origin on edge without any funky bypasses.

Then there's a fact that a bunch of sites/webapps straight up refuse to work on firefox and they ask you to install chrome or something. And lastly chromium the most popular browser flavor and as a web dev it helps to see pages through "the same eyes" as my users/customers.

That's about it, the only reason I use firefox every day is their superior picture-in-picture player, chromium one is waaay inferior.

I switched over to Edge from Firefox because it was simply much better at managing its memory on my laptop. With Firefox I had to be far more cautious about having too many things running at once. WSL2 would often be killed to free up memory.

Recently I found they added the ability to auto-sort and group tabs via Copilot, probably the only thing I've found the non-GitHub copilot to be genuinely useful for.

There are 2 reasons why I'm using chromium (with ublock origin lite) over Firefox:

1. Chromium is significantly faster (maybe 5 to 10x faster on certain tasks mostly around canvas but anything that requires fast ui really). Every time I use Firefox it feels like it has some kind of serious problem. If chrome was this slow I would stop working and start investigating what part of my computer is broken. This experience hasn't changed over span of 10 years, 3 OSes and several computers.

2. Neverending caching issues on Firefox. It just caches too aggressively which makes development really annoying to a point where anytime I encounter issue on Firefox my first thought is "Is this Firefox caching issue?". On chrome when I change button color and I don't see it, I know I made a mistake. If I change button color on Firefox, my first thought is, is this Firefox caching issue? When I develop web I have very quick update loop and I really can't be questioning browser. I cannot work like this. Firefox is unusable for me.

Is that a rhetorical question suggesting those people are wrong, or are you asking for, e.g., the technical reasons some software only works with Chrome in the mix?

For me the two reasons I can't live without are

1. Firefox's ctrl-f search doesn't highlight all instances of a found item on the right hand side. It sounds petty, but its a gigantic timesaver for looking through research documents

2. Firefox's tab crash recovery isn't as solid. I use chrome with fully persistent tabs, and its a gigantic pain if I can't re-open them

If I could find a way to fix these I'd swap in a heartbeat

Locked down computers that still let you install extension.

Since it underpins so much of the modern browser ecosystem it becomes a primary target for webapps to work.

As such, if you want to be sure a website will work you use chrome.

Since chrome has such a market share, developers feel justified testing primarily for chrome.

Self-fulfilling cycle.

Don't know, but I have uninstalled it a few minutes ago.

Find me a browser that doesn't have ai shoved into it... and no I don't mean 10 year old versions of iceweasel.

Work forces me to on the work laptop. But Ublock Origin Lite is good enough for that use-case. I use firefox everywhere else.

Actually, I opted in for tracking. Knowing my interests, Google suggests good articles on their Android app feed.

Also, there are a few parts of Firefox that still look ancient, like the bookmarks and history managers, as well as the PDF viewer, where the buttons are too small to click easily. Unfortunately, those are unusable for a Gen Zer.

On lower end cpus (N100) chromium/brave benchmarks 10-20% faster than Firefox.

I keep chromium installed mostly to run virtual tabletop software (specifically Foundry VTT), because webgl performance in firefox is not great (though it has improved somewhat in the last couple of years). There are also a few sites (mostly restaurants for some reason) that just refuse to work properly in firefox, so I sometimes fall back to chromium. I wish I could drop it like a bad habit, because frankly Google's shenanigans piss me off on a semi-regular basis.

That's pretty irrelevant isn't it? Shouldn't all users demand privacy, especially from ads?

Because they don't bother to learn the history, worse, they are also worshipping Electron crap, which is basically Chrome.

uBlock Origin Lite works perfectly, so I have no complaints?

On mobile, Opera is the only usable browser. It supports text reflow on zoom, and also I can choose the download folder for each file. Allows me to keep porn and non-porn downloads separate.

I'm a Firefox user for about 20yrs (since Firefox 3);

but too often I have to use Chrome, as so many sites only work properly on it; Firefox is really buggy or laggy on those websites;

For a time, all those AI chat web pages were just very slow on Firefox even with very little context, whereas Chrome only gets laggy when there is a lot of context.

Ex-bosses used it so had to test shit on them.

only reason I can think of is synchronization among devices since you can't find same decent browser you could use on Android phone and desktop, Firefox ain't decent browser on neither of those, on desktop Vivaldi with customization and stability is superior, on Android Firefox actually ain't THAT bad since good browsers with extensions support are not that common, I would recommend Cromite, though there is also Helium and Ultimatum

Firefox will also disable V2 sooner or later. BUT. Chrome then will still have uBlock Origin lite. Firefox won't, because mozilla banned that extension from store.

I switched from Firefox to Chrome a couple of years back because Firefox always dragged its feet when it came to implementing important developer features. Like, DataView was excruciatingly slow in Firefox; WebGPU support didnt go anywhere; and they initially refused to implement import maps. I consider the latter to be an essential tool as it allows me to work without the need for build systems. Also, chrome dev tools worked far better.

Since Chrome blocked ublock, I switched to Edge. Not sure where I will go next, but I dont think it will be Firefox since they are always years late.

MV3 itself isn't what breaks uBlock Origin, it is the bundled removal of capabilities that Chrome decided to do. Firefox MV3 supports full WebRequest "scopes" while Chrome only supports declarativeNetRequest.

Vivaldi said We will keep Manifest v2 for as long as it’s still available in Chromium.[1] They kept it before now because it was little effort.

[1] https://vivaldi.com/blog/manifest-v3-update-vivaldi-is-futur...

They can only support MV2 extensions as long as Google continues to maintain them.

Their tech stack is heavily JavaScript-focused, as their entire UI is written in JavaScript.

Ship has already sailed, it's called DoH. Please note, that it is to make your DNS safer and has absolutely nothing to do with removing your ability to resolve DNS in whatever way you want to(cough adblock cough).

> my rights

There's no such thing in the Google realm

The uBlock Origin Lite FAQ said In general, uBOL will be less effective at dealing with websites using anti-content blocker or minimizing website breakage because many filters can't be converted into DNR rules (see log of conversion for technical details).[1]

[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...

wasn't mv3 a dumbed down version? So it "does not work just fine" as some ads slip through?

Caution?: mozilla sync doesn't guarantee storage space? They claim you need another instance running?

I'm confident that Mozilla corporate will find some way to self-sabotage before that happens.

Normies don't care much about ads, trackers and all that nuisance. I find it astonishing when you see them dodging all that crap while browsing the Internet

> full support for ublock origin

This meant they added to Blink all the Gecko features uBlock Origin used?[1] Or they said they could maintain MV2 after Google removed it fully? Or they supported it so far?

They said We'll keep support for MV2 extensions for as long as possible. But other developers said this and meant they would support MV2 until Google removed it.

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

> In the last 10 years I've not come across any site that doesn't work with Firefox

I have. The dominos pizza website (at least in Ireland) basically never works with Firefox. I normally end up using Safari for that particular site.

Additionally, lots of stuff doesn't work when Advanced Tracking Protection is on, enough that if I have any issues my first step is disabling that.

I switched to FireFox like 8 years ago, but to be completely honest there are maybe 2-3 very important sites that straight up do not work for me at all with FireFox. Like, completely unusable, not just weird graphical issues.

I now daily drive firefox, there are unfortunately plently of broken sites. Nebula's video player is broken in widescreen for example.

For me it's speed.

I used FireFox for the same reasons, for years. Every time I started Chrome, it was a breath of fresh air. Everything was just slightly faster to react, to switch tabs, to scroll, to interact.

I kept reading posts about how the FireFox team was increasing performance, yet it never seemed to really impact it. Maybe because I often have several windows with a dozen tabs each (yes, one of those people.)

These days I have given up, and I haven't tried it for about two years now, maybe more. Is it any better? Does anyone know, for real, not a marketing blog post?

It still lives on the Dock, next to Safari and Chrome. I can't bear to remove the icon.

And Mozilla seems way off in the weeds with its product and corporate strategy. At this point, I'd pay for a non-Chromium, highly performant, privacy-first browser.

Meta's ad manager breaks maybe once a year on Safari, so I have to boot up Chrome. Also recently there's been an odd bug on more than one sites (at least Zoho mail and, again, Meta) where the top 20 or so pixels are hidden behind the tab bar. Again works in Chrome. But mostly Safari has been fine.

> whining

- Chrome is safer due to the proper sandboxing of tabs.

- Try watching anything on YouTube on Firefox - for me even 360p stream (on 12c, mostly idle Linux PC) stutters to the point of being unwatchable. None of the is/browser settings work. Yeah, I realise YouTube is owned by Google

That's just my first two (just look it up, don't take my word for it), to show your "whining" claim is just an uneducated hostility not bound in facts.

The only negative experience I've had is with google sites.

'Then you ask them for a site that doesn't work' - For me it was Youtube. Debian 13, Gnome, apt update && apt install firefox, try playing a video. It's always noticebly slower, and last time it didn't even play at all. It might be skill issue or Google malicious behavior or both, but I'm ashamed to say installing Chrome was easier than troubleshooting. I'm slowly growing balls to sacrifice my comfort and migrate nontheless. But I'm tired of people pretending it's just as good and easy to use. Also, if anyone's wondering, gaming on linux still sucks, just a bit less.

No.

You do realize that people have stuff to do and want their browser to be both 1) fast and 2) compatible with all websites?

Firefox is slower than Chromium, and always will have some compatibility issues, because all websites are made with Chromium in mind.

You can pretend all you want that "well ackshually standards exist and all website makers should use things from the standard", but it's not realistic, everyone will just stick with what works on Chromium.

Also projects like Ungoogled Chromium exist, but for some reason Firefox fanboys conveniently ignore them and pretend that all Chromium-based browsers are evil and Firefox is our last bastion of hope (it isn't and also it sucks)

It seems as if they will track it (https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/), with an exception for a selected few extensions (AdGuard AdBlocker, NoScript, uBlock Origin, and uMatrix).

I've found Brave's built in ad blocking to be good enough on its own.

Hah

> 6. You can make money without doing evil

implies that they're doing it for fun then I guess?

> You can make money without doing evil.

Neat! I rate this sentence at 7/10 on my scale of shit American companies say. The top score is currently held by Palantir with their X bio "Software that dominates."

> 6. You can make money without doing evil.

You can but well, it's more profitable the other way around....

Google only moves fast and breaks things that matter.

Their sunsetting of manifest v2 appears fast to me and updating some corporate philosophy has apparently no business impact.

See if you can raise it as an issue. There's clearly a grave errors on the page.

Archive it before they memoryhole it.

"You can make money without doing evil [but that's not what we do]"

What is evil about this?

A browser engine maintained by AI with less human oversight sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Since when does firefox have vpn,?

Pihole is great for DNS filtering but doesn’t hide elements, no filtering and script blocking.

DNS ad blocking is useful. It does not replace browser ad blocking.

Your comment was redundant.[1] And contradicted in the uBlock Origin Lite FAQ.[2] And in the article.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48472424

[2] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...

Actually the main killer feature of UbO for me is cosmetic filtering with element picker, if I wanted just any ad blocker I could use various browsers with built-in adblockers supporting lists.

So much for blocking at network level.

The author of both appears to disagree.

It's all an excuse to try to neuter adblockers. The push for killing MV2 was suspiciously accelerated at the same time that youtube started implementing much more invasive anti-adblock techniques that really needed a full content blocker support (at least until people found new clever workarounds).

Especially since they put no effort into removing even extensions they know are malicious (and who work very well within the MV3 restrictions): https://palant.info/2025/01/20/malicious-extensions-circumve...

It is a "kill switch" - uBlock Origin will no longer work in Chrome 151 (July 28, 2026).