One of the extremely stupid reasons kagi needs to develop a browser is because ios safari prevents setting kagi as the default search engine, so they have to do some terrible hacks to get it to kind of work.
I really hate that you can't set the default search engine easily like in other browsers, or that you can at least easily submit your company to be included in the defaults.
But with the Kagi extension all my searches are always redirected to Kagi on both Safari on iOS and Safari on macOS so I don't really see this as a real blocker as a user.
I understand that this is an onboarding problem, but for a technical user that's really not something preventing me from using Kagi (Like the other comment mentions).
That and Apple anti-competitively preventing non-Safari browsers from using Safari extensions, despite all iOS browsers being essentially Safari under the hood.
I don't remember the last time I used Safari on iOS, but once I started using Kagi, I was naturally drawn to Orion and that's been the best browser experienced I ever had on mobile.
The included ad-blocker being a big factor in the great UX.
That seems wild to me, but admittedly I don't search from the address bar at all. Is setting your preferred search engine as your homepage and opening a new tab to search really such a huge burden?
Yes. I do not tend to launch new tabs. I almost always use a single tab for browsing. Only when I need to keep something around then I launch a new tab to preserve the old one.
That means the address bar is my main interaction with the browser.
