¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Earlier I tried to switch from Chrome to Orion (from the Kagi folks). That did not last.

Even though Orion has various interesting and innovative features, it did not prove to be stable for my workflow. There were various times it has totally frozen or crashed, making me lose track of my open tabs. This is not acceptable, reliability is prime.

You can only realize this by fully switching to it. It is not reproducible, it’s not idempotent; only “vibes” can make you perceive its instability.

I’d be willing to retry it in a few years. Not in 2026 though.

I am not even keeping it around as a secondary browser: I have simply uninstalled it.

The situation on mobile is better. Orion for iOS is great. I’ve been using it as my default iOS browser for ages. Presumably it is stable on iOS because it is actually employing Safari / WebKit underpinnings, as every browser in iOS is required to do.

Now let’s go back to the elephant in the room: I did not want to switch back to Google Chrome:

% brew uninstall google-chrome
==> Uninstalling Cask google-chrome
==> Backing App 'Google Chrome.app' up to '/opt/homebrew/Caskroom/google-chrome/141.0.7390.55/Google Chrome.app'
==> Removing App '/Applications/Google Chrome.app'
==> Purging files for version 141.0.7390.55 of Cask google-chrome

Upon re-evaluating my options, I decided to give Brave a try. There are many things I dislike about Brave in terms of philosophy and politics (for example, Web3 and Crypto), so I cannot endorse it in any way.

However, I realized there are many things that Brave does right out-of-the-box. It has a very decent focus on privacy and adblocking. It strips off Google telemetry and sync (e.g. bookmarks, passwords) features. Its performance and stability is comparable to Chrome – well, they both use Chromium underneath.

I’ve been daily driving Brave as my default / main desktop browser for about 2 months now and I’ve been quite happy with it. It hasn’t crashed at all, not even once. All familiar Chromium features are there. All the Google-proprietary nuisance is gone.

Again, I’d have a hard time to recommend Brave personally. Still, it has been working well for me, so far.