Orion Browser Thoughts
After the recent news of Orion reaching 1.0 on macOS in my previous post Ghost Improvements, Magic Pages & Orion, I decided to install it again and see how it held up with my daily workflow. In short, not good enough.
The full-screen video was very much not my taste. You're supposed to be a browser. I don't need a video blasted in my face on first startup. I thought the same about Arc browser back when that was first released to play with.
The experience of installing browser plugins has absolutely improved. Although there were still a couple that didn't quite behave as expected. One showing what appeared to be a blank box when clicking on the icon. It was, in fact, white text on a white background.
Once I'd got things how I required them for testing my workflows, I began. With only a few sites open (couple of GitHub tabs, some work tools), a couple pinned (Gmail / Calendar). It wasn't long before I started to see some stuttering. Dragging the window around also wasn't entirely smooth. I was also seeing grey, boxlike artifacts left behind where I'd dragged it around randomly.
I compared the CPU usage with the same tabs and content open in Firefox. Orion was consistently using more CPU. Firefox was sat at ~ 1.7–2.9. Orion was jumping up over 9 randomly, and generally sitting around 4.9. It didn't even have all the extensions running I have in Firefox.
This wasn't an in-depth test by any means. This was more about experience. And there's still too many little paper cuts to encourage me to switch at this time.