Orion Browser Reviews

so, this seemed great. use extensions? on my ipad? native vertical tabs? yes, please! ...but no. neither of those features work. like, at all.

i tried extensions from both Firefox and Chrome. they installed perfectly, but they fuctionally did absolutely nothing. and no, i did not install some random extensions. i tried uBlock Origin, which is literally one they recommend. it would not work on any page. neither version. then i tried Ghostery, same issue. honestly i primarily wanted an ad blocker, so i didn't even bother with anything else since neither of those two worked and they're two of the most popular extensions. i mean, if they weren't going to work, there's no point in using the browser. Dark Reader did seem to work most of the time, to be fair.

the "vertical tabs" thing they're touting is frankly a joke. it's the exact same layout as Safari. if you expand the left hand sidebar i guess the tabs are technically vertical? but the horizontal tabs are still visible along the top, sooo... super pointless. the "grid" setting also does nothing. does not change the tab view at all. lol.
this is the second chance i have given Orion. i tried it a while ago on my Mac Studio, where it was so buggy, it was unusable. this ios version technically worked, but it is the exact same as using Safari, except a little slower. so i don't see the point.
i wanted this to be good. oh well i guess, back to the never-ending hunt for a good iPad browser.

A bug that has gone completely unaddressed now for far too long: the browser simply loses track of the tabs I have open!
I will open, say, 3 links in new tabs. The tab switcher will be missing one of them, and the tab count will only have increased by two. Then, when I close a tab, OR when I use the 'swipe the address bar from the right' gesture, the missing tab will suddenly appear.
I feel compelled to leave this review after experiencing the weirdest manifestation of this bug yet: It said I had zero tabs open. None. There was a zero in the button for the tab switcher, no tabs in the switcher. I opened another. It said I had one. Then another, two. But I could use that same gesture to navigate between all three tabs.
I wanted to go report this on the Orion bug tracker with a video, but attempting to sign in with my Apple ID redirected me to about:blank
:|
I still basically have to use this browser to not want to die while browsing the modern web. I'm a paying Kagi user and no one else has ublock on an iphone. But man, I've been using tabbed web browsers since Firefox 2.0. I just don't understand how you lose references to open and interactive tabs.

This browser application is significantly different from any on the Apple Store, especially with the ability to have desktop extensions. The main concerns I’ve noticed using this application is the lack of speed when browsing the internet, lack of customization in regards to the browser tabs aesthetics (Safari’s compact tabs; appearance of the tab close icon); insanely laggy performance on the Blackboard website, (clicking the x tab within a website does not close the open prompt it requires a refresh to regain function. Any use of the extensions renders the browser useless. It presents as a full system OS browser on a iOS limited system that is hindering its performance. The experience mentioned above is on an iPad Pro iOS 18.1.

It’s great there’s a WebKit alternative to Safari. Especially one that can use Firefox or Chrome extensions like uBlock Origin and insist they do not include telemetry within their software.

However, I believe this browser has some distance to go before being ready for prime time. OrionBrowser itself doesn’t feel as polished at the UI level.

The browser extensions on both desktop and mobile do not function as you would expect a native extension depending on the application, but it’s slowly improving. Ever so often something malfunctions which resorts to reinstalling extensions more often.

Frequently, OrionBrowser crashes surrounding the use of the bookmarks feature. This issue has been reported, but was marked as not being able to be reproduced without help for providing follow up last I checked.

The aforementioned issues have caused me to go back to using Safari. I keep Orion around because of uBlock Origin support, and I hope in the future OrionBrowser will improve since I believe there are a lot of good ideas contained in OrionBrowser.

I still dislike the change where holding the tabs icon put the close tabs options to the top. At least give us the option to customize cause I personally preferred them on the bottom of the order.

OrionBrowser still needs improvement on battery drain and heating up my phone.

Last I’ve been checking out the filter lists. As someone who doesn’t know much it would be nice if the default ones gave you some details on what they do. Also it would be nice to have some direction on which third party’s might work well or better. Hopefully it just gets improved cause the browser has crazy potential to be a favorite for people.

In time, this will become my goto browser once all the bugs are ironed out.

The ability to have true desktop sites (override viewport width) and custom user agent, not to mention actual browser extension support for most Chrome AND Firefox desktop extensions sets this browser WAY ahead of the competition, and I say that as a loyal Brave user who ditched Safari years ago.

However, both of the above browsers are stable to use, whereas Orion currently cannot load any page on my iPhone without crashing to home.

I am currently on iOS 13.3.1. I hope it gets better support later. Unfortunately, OrionBrowser doesn't really work much at all on this iOS at this time.

On my iPad which has a much more recent iOS version, this is a fantastic browser, although the two streaming sites I tried using still didn't work—1 still wanted me to download the mobile app, while the other thought I was on desktop but ran into playback error when trying to play video. But I assume these are problems because they're not meant to be streamed in mobile browsers sadly. Not OrionBrowser ’s fault.

I like the organization of options and tabs. Adding AI tab organization would be good. The ability to turn off scripts is wonderful to read sites with annoying ads. But I’ve stopped using the browser almost altogether because it takes so long to load. It may be from having a lot of tabs open, but I’ve had a lot of tabs open in chrome and other browsers without any problem. Sometimes it crashes. Also, when I turn my phone to landscape and the back to portrait mode, half the screen is blank and I have to close it and restart. Would have been 5 stars but for the slowness, crashing, and orientation problems. I would be happy to pay for a better supported browser.

This seems like a relatively new project, so I’m assuming a lot of this browser’s problems will be solved with time. It really is safari on crack (with a little bit of brave- the ad block is lovely) and I really like it!

However, it’s quite buggy. When in split screen view, the bookmark and share button end up over the search bar. Whenever I want to copy or paste something, it always asks me to allow it (maybe it’s a setting I need to change?). It’s totally understandable that the desktop browser extension integration is clunky since it says it’s still experimental, but some of them straight up don’t work. Things that need a popup, like Yomichan, are almost useless in Orion.

I’m really excited to see where this browser goes. It looks really promising!

I’ve switched to Orion from Safari, because there’s certain features I personally don’t like the Apple has implemented recently. While the Mac app is great, the iOS is pretty bad to use. There is latency when scrolling which should not ever happen in a modern iOS app, and just makes the user experience awful and almost unusable! For some reason when you wanna see you all the tabs you have open, the first once you open or set at the bottom where in Safari it’s usually at the top which is already common in most browsers. There’s no way to customize the library section to just have the reading list section. And on all devices, it makes zero sense to save your favorite pages either in favorites or bookmarks? on macOS, while you can organize your favorites websites in the homepage, you can’t organize folders unless you go into a different view and do it yourself, but that alone is a pain because OrionBrowser has a mind of its own. I wanna love this browser, but it’s still not perfect. Please fix these issues.

I love Kagi and I love Orion! I use Orion for everything. I love the functionality and how robust the extension support is, no other browser is quite like this! The only reason I didn’t give 5 stars is because it still needs a little more Kagi Account integration features, to make it feel more like the Kagi app for iOS. Also, I think the UI needs to be setup so it can get out of the way when I’m browsing more. And lastly, built-in Small Web support. I would love that especially. Other than those, this browser is amazing! I like to stack it with Safari. You can layer WebKit features so that they work in any WebKit browser and then use Extensions to support them, making your privacy & security more robust than ever when browsing!

I was very excited to hear about better extension support on iOS. Sadly, it seems this wasn’t meant to be. Basically every big name extension I tried failed completely. I was especially disappointed that Tap to Tab didn’t work. The customization is otherwise amazing compared to Safari, and I really appreciate the gestures. I hope the devs keep at this and focus more on the extension support as the rest of the browser is basically perfect in my eyes, and this would be the other big advantage it could have over Safari

Jan 8th edit: Hey! This isn’t a review but a reply to the developer’s reply, tried what you said and you were right! Kagi was automatically selected as the main search engine for some reason even though I’ve literally never opened that setting before— glad to say the experience is just as free as it is on my iPhone, thanks for the help!

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I’ve been using Orion as my main search engine on my iPhone 14 since the start of the year, and it works great, I’m especially happy about the fact I can actually have an Adblocker I downloaded OrionBrowser on my iPad though (got one for Christmas) and it’s not letting me search anything without making a Kagi account?? It’s not like that on iPhone, what’s with the sudden shift? There’s no option to turn this off either, and anything I search is met with the Kagi login screen.

Been using this for a long while. It’s more of a full-on replacement for Safari rather than an alternative. It’s a LOT more private and has a lot more actually useful features. The only thing is OrionBrowser still has some way to go for stability. It often soft locks on me, forcing me to restart it. I do miss how this was never a problem in Safari, but that browser is way too far behind this one for me to consider going back. At least they’re still regularly updating it with bug fixes, so somewhere down the road, these issues may be addressed. Big fan of this browser though. It’s not every day that I’d go out of my way to write a review for an app.

I’ve been a software developer for 20+ years, so I really know the kind of things to look for in a good project. Orion is hands down a gift from the IOS Gods! Even if Apple didn’t force developers to use main parts of the Apple ecosystem These guys couldn’t have done it better. Let’s face it in most cases Safari is a great browser that most all other platforms wish they had natively. With Orion it’s like having all your favorite aspects of other browsers added to Safari, and all those limited UI issues that Safari possesses has been overcome with Orion. This is just really nice and really needs more support from users like us. With the community being rather small I fear that such a great thing may disappear, or even worse Apple get mad at all the truths of its greatness and just simply cease to allow it to be downloaded from the appstore anymore, yes this happens! Please Apple Listen to your users, if anything work with these guys not against them, this is a great browser based on the best mainstream browser of the masses. Could not ask for anything better!!

I feel compelled to leave this review and give Orion a full five stars because it’s incredibly unfair that an app offering such unique features doesn’t already have a five-star rating.

The ability to use Firefox or Chrome extensions on an iPhone, in any capacity, is unmatched—and Orion delivers it, albeit imperfectly at the moment.

While I can sympathize with some of the frustrations voiced in other reviews and agree that it’s not yet seamless, the fact remains: no other iOS browser comes close to what Orion offers. The effort and innovation the developer has poured into OrionBrowser deserve to be cheered on and supported.

Unfair criticisms in reviews, especially for apps with lower review counts, can be disheartening for developers. Unfortunately, the first thing most people notice when browsing for an app is its star rating.

OrionBrowser truly deserves five out of five stars. Even though I don’t use it all the time—partly for some of the reasons mentioned in other reviews—its innovation and unique capabilities need to be acknowledged and celebrated.

[Editing the stars from my review because after upgrading to iOS 26 the scroll is no longer an issue!]

I like everything about this browser except the scroll. It does this weird thing where it doesn't stop as soon as you life your finger off the screen, and even though basically all scrolling works like that, it feels a lot more exaggerated with Orion. I'm not sure how to describe it accurately but it like makes the screen feel VERY "slippery" in comparison. Like the pages I'm viewing are wrapped around something and every time I scroll it just makes the pages slip off. If this scrolling is an intended feature and not a bug, at least make it toggle-able like everything else.

Hands down the best browser for iOS. Which suprised me as well. It's build by the Kagi search engine team, which is uses subsciption model instead of ads and is comparable to Google in terms of quality of the search results. This browser is totally free, though. You can use brave search and it's build in privacy respecting AI. You can set your own useragent, but you should use just use a recent iOS one, since the device type is still visible (iPhone) and even custom blocklists can be imported. Haven't noticed it phoning home to Kagi. So no telemetry I'd guess and still pretty active develpment going on (mind the great detail in changelogs).

Great browser, I’ve always wanted a browser that has the functions of Brave but the look of Safari. Also, on top of it, you offer global page zoom. I can’t express enough how hard this is to find on web browsers on iOS for some odd reason. I like all my websites at 75% zoom. Having that built in as a global website option is a huge plus for me. All around, the layout is great too. I love how you can tell that it’s native to iOS, which means you took the actual time and effort to build it instead of copying and pasting like Brave does (no offense to Brave, but it’s true). Also, Brave isn’t really as private as they make themselves out to be. They have their fingers in too many things and have too many departments. This is a small group of people making a genuine good product that isn’t tainted by a big corporation’s motto standpoint, and I appreciate that a lot.

This web browser is perhaps the best I’ve used in over a decade. It’s a well known issue how mobile web browsers, especially on Apple devices are really just spyware. Orion by contrast is not only good at enhancing my privacy with minimal effort, it also is less buggy than nearly all the major players, Safari, Chrome, and whatever Microsoft is calling its browser these days. I highly recommend this browser and I love it so much I will be making a donation to the developers. Than you Orion for being excellent in a sea of barely functional crud.

I love the Orion/Kagi team’s mission and I support both products financially with my own hard earned money. A no-telemetry browser is a great start (and rare), but I can’t consider it a high-level privacy browser until it supports profiles—like the desktop Orion browsers does. Telemetry and tracking from your browser is only one piece of the privacy puzzle, and practically small potatoes compared to the companies tracking you online So having isolated cookies, history, etc. is pretty huge. To be fair though, this is rare (and difficult to implement) in mobile browsers. Aside from Safari and one or two other (not as good) browsers, it doesn’t exist. So Orion is not behind in this regard. But having on both platforms makes for a consistent experience and enhances privacy, especially considering how much we use our phones now. So I really hope they can integrate this feature in the future so I can make it my daily driver. Other than that, there are definitely some bugs, laggy behavior, and sometimes crashing depending on what you’re doing, but it’s definitely gotten a lot better overtime. This is all to be expected. This is not some huge tech company, it’s a small team of dedicated developers. So I wouldn’t recommend this for the average user that wants a browser “that just works”— although it would be awesome if they got there one day. But power-users, tinkers, nerds, or people that want to support a great mission will find plenty to delight in.