Comment by grayhatter
1 month ago
earlier in the thread I read nhe plan was to release the source "when it has merit" But that instantly left me with the feeling that the authors of the browser, and I have very different opinions on what the word merit means. Such that they would be incompatible, and I'd never want to use it. This is a decision that has lowered my opinion about exactly how much I can trust Kagi.
> Kagi founder here. Orion isn't open source yet primarily because we're a 5-person team that spent 6+ years building this and created significant IP doing so,
But it's possible I haven't considered some detail where I might agree it's reasonable. Can you describe or offer any insight into the "significant IP" that you need to protect and defend? What threats from a larger company are you primarily concerned about?
I'm not the founder nor Kagi employee, just a customer, but
> Can you describe or offer any insight into the "significant IP" that you need to protect and defend?
The novel IP is having implemented and still implementing the browser APIs necessary for both Firefox and Chromium extensions to work in a Safari (Webkit)-based browser. See [1] for the significant progress.
> What threats from a larger company are you primarily concerned about?
Integrating said functionality themselves to offer another viable iOS browser, which Kagi is currently the only [2] offerer of (or another viable macOS/future Linux/Windows browser, although more than one exist there already).
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14IgSRVop4psUTgtLZlvY... (via: https://help.kagi.com/orion/misc/technical.html)
[2] Unless the EU steps up, all iOS browsers will continue to have to be Webkit-based with minimal, lackluster extension support. Not viable for anything beyond the most basic of use cases.