I've never understood what niche Orion is supposed to fill. People who value privacy would be more likely to use an open-source browser. Firefox and Brave already serve that purpose. Maybe it's less important to Mac users, but on Linux, a proprietary browser is a major deal-breaker for most people. Plus, it's less convenient if the browser isn't simply included in the repository as a result. Orion should have been developed as open source from the start, with community involvement. Kagi can still benefit from this, though, by serving as the default search engine in exchange for funding the development, and by having the Kagi Assistant directly integrated into the platform.

For me the answer is quite simple: it's the only browser on iOS that lets you run Chrome extensions and Firefox add-ons.

On iOS it integrates better with Kagi search. It is basically a skin for safari though.

Anecdotally, the niche it solved for me for a while was "Safari for optimal performance on mac, but with proper extensions like ublock".

I used it regularly for almost a year, eventually got off because of some UI bugs that came up and because the Safari dev tools feel so clunky/need relearning compared to Chrome & FF.

I've been paying for kagi since it came out, use linux on my laptop and lineaege on my phone, and I don't use Orion.

In other words, as you say, exactly.

I have no idea if it's a good or bad or I'd like it or not. I never even considered trying. I don't mind that it exists. I don't think kagi are doing anything bad with it. But I also just have no interest in even trying it. Presumably it's good for soneone but for me (a paying kagi customer linux user) it's almost like it's invisible. A probably benign, utterly uninteresting thing.

I don't use any of their AI features either. I hope they cost extra seperately so that I'm not paying for that stuff I'm not using but I suspect I probably am.