Orion Browser --Why it Replaced Safari
July 10 ,2026 Apple&Technolgy
A MacStories article sent me to Orion about a year ago. I don't remember the exact headline — something about a Safari alternative worth trying. I downloaded it, set it as my default, and mostly forgot I'd made a switch. That's usually a good sign.
Orion is built by Kagi, a small company that also runs a private search engine. The browser runs on WebKit, the same engine underneath Safari, so it feels familiar on the Mac — quick, light on memory, easy on the battery. What it does differently is the part that kept me there.
Safari's extensions have always felt like a managed selection. Not bad, exactly — Apple's curation has its logic — but limited in a way that occasionally sends you looking for workarounds. Orion opens that up. It runs extensions built for Chrome, extensions built for Firefox, and Safari extensions too. The tools you already know from other platforms work here without having to choose a different browser entirely. That alone changed how I thought about the browser as a tool — less a gate, more a workbench.
I've used browsers that promised more and delivered friction. Orion mostly stays out of the way. Pages load, tabs behave, nothing asks me to create an account or sign into anything before I can get started. Kagi says Orion collects no telemetry — no usage data going back to their servers. I can't verify that independently, but I haven't seen anything in a year to make me doubt it. In an era when most software wants something from you in return, that restraint is worth noticing.
There's a focus mode that strips the browser chrome away entirely and leaves you with just the page. I use it more than I expected. Reading long pieces, working through documentation, anything where the interface itself becomes noise. It disappears, and you're just in the text. My father would have called that a tool that knows its job — doesn't try to be more than what it is, does what it does without announcing itself.
The browser also handles profiles cleanly, which matters when your work pulls in different directions. Research in one space, personal browsing in another, each with its own extensions and history. It sounds like a small thing until you've lost an afternoon to tab confusion.
The honest caveat: Orion only hit its first stable release late last year. Before that it ran as a long beta, which is how I used it for most of that year. Small team — six people, I think — which means the bug reports are real and fixes sometimes take a while. Nothing I encountered stopped me from working, but that's my experience with my setup. Yours might differ.
A year in, Safari is still on my machine. I just don't open it much. Whether a browser that hands you more choices is better than one that makes fewer choices for you — that probably depends on how you feel about choices in the first place.
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