Mac Browser Wars?

Ldstephens has recently been trying out both Arc and Orion, and has some thoughts on them:

Then I tried Arc. That lasted all of a few hours. I just wasn’t interested in learning a whole new way of using a web browser.

Lastly, I gave Orion another shot. It looks and works a lot like Safari. One thing that might be attractive to Safari users is that Orion works with Firefox and Chrome extensions.

I tried Arc at the end of last year. While it has some neat ideas about how a browser should work, I was put off by several problems:

1. Profiles, which looked promising from a privacy standpoint, are just separate Chrome profiles which couldn’t share extensions between them. That’s a big deal for someone who uses a third-party password manager.
2. Arc could import data from other browsers, but exporting data from it was limited. I worry it could turn into a roach motel for bookmarks.
3. A personal red flag for me was that Arc’s search defaulted to Google. Not a good look for a company claiming to care about your privacy.
4. The big red flag was the lack of substantive information about how The Browser Company will make money.

Orion, by contrast, is evolutionary rather than revolutionary — fixing the one Achilles’ Heel of Safari, extension support. However, beyond that, it’s just a different UI over Safari’s WebKit engine. That’s not a knock against WebKit, by the way. I use Safari as my primary browser on the Mac, and it works flawlessly for me.

Would I swap over to Orion? A few years ago, I might have been tempted. But I no longer rely on browser extensions to improve my experience, opting for quality over quantity. So for me, the draw of Orion isn’t as powerful.