Congrats for the project! Love the simple UI and extensions support.
Don't you fear being held back by WebKit, which is notoriously slow to implement new web platform features? Can you give some insights on how you chose the engine?
To answer the question, we need to go a step back and answer how did we chose the platform first. The decision to go with macOS first was made in 2018 for the simple reason that we thought macOS has a bright future as a consumer OS. This was pre-M1 so we are glad to see macOS adoption grow!
Once we settled on macOS, WebKit was a natural choice as it is the web rendering engine supported by the OS manufacturer. This would enable us to have best performance and OS integration features. The drawback was lack of any browser app frameworks so we basically had to write the browser app from scratch.
I am not that worried about WebKit's slow(er) pace of web platform feature adoption (although I'd love to see something like AVIF support etc.) partly because I know that these decisions are carefully weighted for their impact (what is the right level of hardware/browser/web separation for example). In the future, if Orion becomes success, we hope to be able to have full time contributors to help accelerate its development.
Don't you fear being held back by WebKit, which is notoriously slow to implement new web platform features? Can you give some insights on how you chose the engine?
Thanks!