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As I've joined the Orion community and started frequenting its forum, one thing that has come to my attention more and more is the apparent cycle of Example Extension Gets Updated --> Example Extension Ceases to Work Correctly in Orion --> The Community Complains --> Kagi Update Orion.

The company currently promote certain extensions as "Popular Extensions" right within Orion;

Inside is a relatively modest collection of extensions with (presumably) a large number of users - including some password managers, such as Proton Pass (which I use), and 1Password (which it seems literally every other living person on the forum is currently using... #NotBitter).

I think it's a poor user experience if the browser essentially promotes an extension to you, you install it, and either it never works properly or it silently breaks the next time the extension's author pushes an update. It's one thing if a relatively indie tech company makes a browser, says they'll try to support all Firefox & Chrome extensions, and occasionally there's breakages. But when they have specifically promoted an extension to you themselves, and then that breaks..? It's just a bad look.

So my thinking is that only for a select few browser extensions that are widely used in the Orion userbase, Kagi could have Orion not automatically update those extensions until the update has been tested internally by the team, and / or has been tested by those using RC builds of Orion. If an extension is flagged as a "Popular Extension", Kagi's servers could maintain a list of their names & version numbers - only performing an automatic update for that extension if it wouldn't lead to a higher version number than the one vetted by Kagi.

I have to give a lot of credit to @laiz for testing my suggestion and forcing me to iterate upon it! One of the things laiz brought to my attention is the question of whether Orion, by default, automatically updates extensions. I'm assuming it will by v1.0 if it isn't already - and it's a setting many will turn on in any case.

    Hey! Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts. Extensions are a difficult topic as everyone has a different setup and interacts with their extensions in a unique way.

    Currently, to my knowledge, Orion's Popular Extensions are not automatically updated, as that could lead to them breaking, resulting in a poor experience. For example, the current version of uBlock Origin in the Popular Extensions section is 1.58.0 whereas the current latest stable version is 1.62.0. Users can choose to manually upgrade it, however. Overall, the Popular Extension category is a list of extensions that have been tested by the community and confirmed to work adequately, earning them a spot on the list.

    Regarding mirroring the extensions and throttling the releases, I could see there being some potential license issues or other legal gray areas — are there any other browsers that do something similar?

      laiz Currently, to my knowledge, Orion's Popular Extensions are not automatically updated, as that could lead to them breaking, resulting in a poor experience.

      Once they're installed, I would assume they'd respect the Automatic updates setting;

      I cannot remember whether that being enabled is the default for Kagi or something I changed - however, it's certainly the default in most web browsers, and as far as I'm aware I don't have a single friend who chooses to manually monitor each of their extensions, check for issues after an update, and only then update them manually. I would assume that setting being enabled would be the default by the time 1.0 is released, if it isn't already.

      laiz Regarding mirroring the extensions and throttling the releases, I could see there being some potential license issues or other legal gray areas — are there any other browsers that do something similar?

      You're right; I hadn't really stopped to look at the different licenses used by popular extensions!

      There's ways around that, though.

      The team could maintain a known good version for each popular extension, have Orion poll for that periodically, and only update a 'Popular Extension' if the update wouldn't take it above the version vetted by the team. I can't imagine any legal issues could possibly ensue from them storing an extension name & version number.

            sarno changed the title to Consider More Tightly Controlling Updates to Orion’s ”Popular Extensions” .
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