📢 Status Update: Orion for Linux and Windows

Date: October 2, 2026 | Read Time: ~2 minutes

Today, we are sharing a significant pivot regarding our browser development. Kagi has decided to cease the internal development of Orion for both Windows and Linux. To ensure these projects can still thrive, we are open-sourcing both versions, handing the keys over to the community.

🎯 The Strategy: Why This Change?

Our team is remarkably lean—consisting of only a few developers—and we are powered exclusively by the support of Kagi users. We intentionally avoided the "easy" path of forking Chromium because we believe the internet is healthier when it isn't dependent on a single engine.

"The web needs more than one engine, and more than one company deciding what a browser should be."

We recognize that building a cross-platform browser is a monumental task typically reserved for venture-capital-backed giants or massive open-source collectives. To maximize our impact, we are shifting our resource allocation:

$\text{Total Effort} = \text{macOS Focus} + \text{iOS Focus}$

The Decision Logic

🍎 Impact on macOS and iOS

For our users on Apple devices, the news is purely positive. By consolidating our energy, we can make Orion faster, more stable, and more powerful.

• macOS: Continued deep development.
• iOS: Enhanced capabilities and stability.

🔓 The Path to Open Source

We believe the work we've put into the Windows and Linux versions is too valuable to simply discard. Here is the plan for the transition:

1. Code Release: The source code will be made public within the next 30 days.
2. Stewardship: We are currently in talks with open-source organizations to find a long-term home for the project.
3. Kagi's Role: To be explicit, Kagi will be the primary maintainer not be the core maintainer moving forward.

🛠️ Developer Call-to-Action

If you are a maintainer or an organization interested in leading the charge for Orion on these platforms, please reach out!

• Finalize source code audit
• Publish licensing details
• Hand over to community stewards

💻 What This Means for Current Users

Note for Windows users: If you were subscribed to our Windows-specific newsletter, this serves as your final update from that list.

❤️ A Final Word of Thanks

We are incredibly grateful to the early adopters, the bug hunters, and everyone who championed the idea of a privacy-centric, WebKit-based browser outside of the Apple ecosystem. You helped us create something meaningful.

Thank you for your trust, your enthusiasm, and your patience.

— The Kagi Team

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Technical Note: For those interested in the underlying architecture, Orion continues to prioritize WebKit over the common Blink/Chromium stack to maintain engine diversity.

# Example of how the community might eventually 
# build the open-sourced version:
git clone https://github.com/kagi/orion-linux
cd orion-linux
./build.sh