¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

It takes effort to overcome friction.

This year I have completely moved away from Google Search. First, thanks to ChatGPT. Then, thanks to Kagi.

You may think this is a blog post gimmick to sound dramatic, but it is really not. Nowadays I bail out to Google (!g in Kagi and in DuckDuckGo) very rarely:

• to search for a store to buy a product from (it’s a commercial search engine after all) – do not use it to seek product recommendations though, they would be biased
• to see what mainstream search results look like for a specific search term
• to search for something obscure or rare – for example, torrents of Linux ISOs™

And now I had been meaning to switch from Google Chrome.

Chromium or Ungoogled Chromium are solid choices, but I wanted to move away completely from the Chromium ecosystem.

Firefox is not a real choice anymore. Firefox was amazing in the 2010s.

Excluding the above, there isn’t a lot of choice.

Safari is solid but it evolves slowly and babysits the power user. I am flabbergasted that I still, in 2025, cannot change its default search engine to one of my choice. This is not OK. It’s possible to use Kagi in Safari by working around its restrictions with an extension, but it is hacky.

Ladybird is promising but it’s still a baby.

If we backtrack to Chromium derivatives, there’s Opera, Vivaldi, Edge and Brave.

Edge is full of Copilot and classic MSFT stuff these days. MSFT, you know, from Internet Explorer.

Vivaldi has way too many features. It is confusing. I want simplicity and minimalism. Vivaldi is like the KDE of Web Browsers.

Opera has no moat. It has lots of bookmarks with sponsors though.

Brave could be a good choice, it ships with some good defaults, but it is surrounded by controversy.

Arc / Dia are very, very, very far from being real options. No, thank you.

Browser vendors have their own interests in mind. They all have their own agenda. It is very hard to find one that has the user interests in mind.

So now I am trying out Orion.

Orion is based on WebKit. It heavily resembles Safari. It supports both Firefox and Chrome extensions, including manifest V2 ones. It ships with a content blocker (adblocker). It has no telemetry. Kagi products and features (search, translate) are well integrated into Orion, but they do not feel pushy in case you do not want to use them. There’s Orion for iOS, so it’s possible to seamlessly sync your browsing history and bookmarks across multiple devices should you want to – and that is done via iCloud.

WebKit. Extensions. Privacy. Pick all three.

I do not have more to say at this time. The test of time will tell whether it will stick.