The Early Beta Build of Orion for Linux is Now Available!

We know many of you have been eagerly waiting for a chance to try Orion Browser on Linux, and we’ve been hard at work to make progress behind the scenes. After months of building the foundations, we’re excited to share this early beta with you. It’s our first opportunity to let you get hands-on with the new features we’ve been developing.

What’s included in this early beta

Browsing made smoother

The core of Orion is fully connected to the Linux UI, and basic browsing is ready: you can navigate pages, use back, forward, and refresh actions, and start exploring multiple tabs. This milestone lays the groundwork for a more flexible and powerful tab system.

Staying organized and secure

We’ve added password management, history tracking, and Dark Mode and Focus Mode, giving you more control over your browsing experience. Custom search engines can be defined in Settings > Search, making it easy to search directly from the address bar.

Stability and polish

This early beta also brings several fixes that improve reliability - from preventing crashes when closing pinned tabs to resolving freezes in Website Settings, and ensuring new installations allow creating new tabs without issues.

Note:

Kagi Sync and webKit Extensions are still in development and not supported in Beta

✴ Try the Early Beta ✴

You can download the Flatpak build of Orion Browser for Linux here: Download Orion Early Beta (Flatpak)

What’s next

This early beta is just the beginning. Over the coming weeks, we’ll continue refining tab management, expanding WebExtension support and improving stability and usability.

We’d love to hear from you

As always, your thoughts, questions, and suggestions are welcome. They guide us in shaping the future of Orion on Linux, and we’re excited to have you on this journey with us. Go to our dedicated Orion Feedback Website: https://orionfeedback.org/

Browse Beyond ✴︎ The Orion for Linux Team

      • kibiz0r@midwest.socialEnglish
        103·
        18 hours ago

        To be clear, the best case scenario here is a Chrome vs Chromium scenario, because they want the ability to slip in some proprietary components into their official build in order to play nicely with their paid services.

        Seems fair to me, and I understand why that’s a substantial effort if they’re still at basically a PoC stage.

        Edit: And for the record, I am much happier paying With Reach (Kagi) with my dollars than I ever was paying Google with my data, so I’m very much in favor of this model. Still, some neckbeards only wanna use software from orgs who are in it “for the love of the game”.

        • talkingpumpkin@lemmy.world
          161·
          10 hours ago

          Still, some neckbeards only wanna use software from orgs who are in it “for the love of the game”.

          Nope, that’s just you fighting strawmen and labelling people who don’t hold your same opinion “neckbeards”.

          I would be excited for a new FOSS browser regardless of specific features, and I could be excited for a non-FOSS one if it had particularly promising features that are not provided by any FOSS browser. As far as I can see, Orion does not fall in either category.

          BTW marketing a product for its privacy (or security) without it being open source amounts to having “trust me bro” as a slogan… of course one is free to trust whoever they want to.

        • artyom@piefed.socialOPEnglish
          51·
          18 hours ago

          they want the ability to slip in some proprietary components

          Why is that?