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

  • Otter@lemmy.ca
    5·
    15 hours ago

    Edit: see the reply on my comment

    I’m not sure if I understood this criticism. The Reddit thread links to this page:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20251203060750/https://kagi.com/changelog#5340

    Our image search became even better with the inclusion of two more sources: Yandex Image Search (widely recognized as one of best image search services) and Openverse (vast collection of openly licensed images). Kagi is doing the hard work so that you don’t have to.

    Are they financially supporting or sponsoring Yandex in some other way?

    To me, this sounds like they added the option to run an image search on Yandex? I use a browser extension for image searches that has a number of options including Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, Sogou, etc., and users are free to choose which ones they want to try searching on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search_by_image/

    I also remember seeing Bellingcat (who has done excellent investigative reporting on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) using Yandex tools to gather information because it has information on the region that other English/Chinese focused tools don’t.

    I don’t doubt that Yandex tries to manipulate information in favor of the government in Russia. Rather with the right browser protections, someone can take advantage of their free tools and cost Yandex money without Yandex benefiting from it. It’s not necessarily a bad thing for Kagi to let people do that?