I tried for a while but found too much friction getting it all working on my phone (iOS). It wasn’t TOO crazy—I just think Apple didn’t take into account that a search engine might require authentication. Though maybe it’s easier now—I should give it another look.

Yeah I've never had any issues on iOS, that said I'm mostly using Orion on my phone these days. They have a page here covering iOS browsers: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h...

I switched to Orion as my main browser on my iPhone

I was using Firefox previously

So, not only my overall browser experience improved, but Kagi is natively _infused_ in Orion, so that was the easiest setup I had to make

If you have settings synced between devices, I'd see how that would be an issue (I'm still 100% on Firefox on my Linux/MacOS/Windows devices)

If you don't mind taking the time: as an actual user, what would you say are the top 3 things you, personally, get out of this?

I'm a Kagi user, primarily for the non-sponsored search results.

The AI stuff in Kagi doesn't pique my interest. Their Orion pitch also doesn't, but I'm interested in an actual user's opinion.

Sure!

My top 3 would be:

1. customized and sanitized search results

2. Assistant

3. custom bangs

And to develop more:

- Not only I don't have ads in my results, but they are customized and sanitized based on my settings, since I can block some websites, put a better ranking on others... or even use lenses if I want to use a very precise scope

- With Assistant I have access to (almost) all the most recent and popular models, I can easily switch, even inside a thread, so I don't need to have an account (and a subscription) at OpenAI, Anthropic... They are immediately available in a single web interface (and soon in CLI)

- Bangs are not new, but with Kagi I can create my owns, and they are well implemented within the Kagi _universe_, so I even have custom bangs to start a chat with Assistant with specific models (ex: typing "!cl" will start a chat with Assistant using Claude)

And overall, what's make everything better is that I only need to setup the Kagi extension, and then all my settings are shared between my devices. My custom Kagi style is automatically shared. My search settings are automatically shared. My Assistant threads are automatically shared. My custom bangs are automatically shared.

As soon as I setup the Kagi extension, I have the same great Kagi experience!

Regarding Orion, I use it on my iPhone since it provides better performances than Firefox and Kagi works great in it. But on computers I still use Firefox because I have more expectations, I'm not only on MacOS and, to be honest, I haven't found the experience that great; mostly because I'm not a fan of the UI.

Much appreciated! I shall investigate. :)

Apple doesn't take into account that users might want to use some other search engine not on their very limited list of options that Safari has. But this is solved by using just about any other browser.

That aside, though, I'm not sure what the difference between mobile and desktop is for this scenario? In both cases you basically have to log into Kagi once using your web browser of choice, it sets the cookie accordingly, and thereafter things "just work". I don't even remember when I did that for my iPhone, but I think it's been over a year now?