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![[image] Kagi Ends Orion Browser Development for Linux, Will Open-Source It](https://europe.pub/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Flinuxiac.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2026%2F10%2Forion-browser-end-of-story.jpg)
Kagi has announced it will stop developing the Orion Browser for Linux and Windows, ending its direct work on these platforms. The good news is that instead of dropping the project, the company plans to open-source both versions so other developers or organizations can keep them going.
For Linux users, this is a big shift for a browser that had just started to show real promise. Orion first came to Linux in early alpha at the start of the year, then officially entered beta in August.
Now, only a few months later, Kagi says the current Linux Beta will keep working, but it will stop getting updates from the company after October 2, 2026. Kagi also warns users not to use the beta as their main browser. The main reason is limited resources.
Kagi says only a small team of developers works on Orion, and the project is funded entirely by Kagi users. Expanding Orion beyond Apple platforms was always a big challenge, especially since the company chose not to use Chromium as its base.
Instead, Orion uses WebKit, which makes it one of the few browsers trying to offer an alternative to the many Chromium-based ones.
Kagi says that keeping a browser running on multiple platforms usually requires either a lot of funding or a big open-source community. Since Kagi has neither, it will now focus its limited resources on Orion for macOS and iOS.
The work done on Linux and Windows will be released as open source instead.
Kagi plans to publish the source code for both versions and share more details within 30 days of the announcement. The company has also reached out to open-source foundations and organizations about possibly taking over the projects in the long term.
However, Kagi makes it clear that it does not plan to be the main maintainer of either open-source project. Any future updates will depend on developers or organizations willing to take over the code.
In short, Orion for Linux’s future depends on what happens after the source code is released and whether a community forms to maintain it. For now, the current beta still works, but without future security updates or maintenance from Kagi, it likely won’t be a good daily browser for long.
For more details, see the official announcement
Kagi Ends Orion Browser Development for Linux, Will Open-Source It
Probably a net good they’re open sourcing it. This project would never get the love it needs with a small team and such wildly spread resources.
Hopefully the community grabs this and makes it good, I want to see WebKit flourish so there’s more competition against chrome, and that means being more than the iPhone browser.
Curtains call without open sourcing would be worse of course, but I'm skeptical if anyone will pick this up. Like if I were the Gnome Browser guys, I would take a look to see what can be used, but that's it.
This browser was really cool because, despite being WebKit, it was compatible with Firefox and Chrome extensions. That alone made it more worth trying than any non-FF or non-Chromium browser.
I hope that any other WebKit browsers (like Epiphany/GNOME Web) take that from Orion and adopt it in their own browser. That would make them viable.
One of the only reasons why Orion is neat, it's the only one out of the lot in iOS that supports extensions, since on iOS, all the browsers are based on WebKit. It's not particularly great otherwise, it's just Safari with extensions support + a couple productivity things after all, and it's closed-source (it doesn't look like the iOS app will go FOSS any time soon)
On Android, we have a duopoly instead, which isn't that much better, but at least one of the two (Firefox) allows extensions on mobile browsers.
And there's no reason why you should use Orion on a desktop OS, since better options are plentiful (Firefox and forks, even Chromium ones like Helium or Ungoogled Cr)
I do hope that some of the tricks in Orion could be used in Linux browsers that are actually good, especially for mobile Linux! Firefox does work on it, but only with tweaks (and even then, it's not fantastic compared to something like GNOME Web)
This was a big selling point for me too. Unfortunately the ones I needed to work ( addons/extensions) depended on firefox containers and did not work in orion.
It did seem to work properly otherwise.
Yeah, last I checked, Kagi claimed something like 70% compatibility with the extension APIs. It wasn't perfect, but it was enough for uBlock Origin and my password manager to work, which are my minimum requirements for a browser.
I had to give up using Orion on iOS because the feature that let me play YouTube music videos with the screen off was chewing through my battery like crazy.
Yes, it allowed me to also use uBlock origin and such but if I couldn’t use it for background music streaming then what’s the point?
That’s when I learned that safari lets you install uBlock origin and the others in addition to background YouTube streaming, so that’s my main browser now.
It's uBlock Origin Lite*. It's good but, not as powerful as uBlock Origin on Firefox proper.
That’s true, though to my knowledge Firefox on iPhone doesn’t let you use extensions besides what Mozilla decides to bake into the browser, so even a hobbled version of uBlock is worlds better than no uBlock.
It’s why my main browser was Orion + full uBlock origin for quite a while til I got sick of the battery drain problem.
Also ended up trying Wipr which also helps
Or use NewPipe
Your suggestion is use an android only app on iPhone 🤔
Is NewPipe on iOS? I thought it was Android only.