Link Preview doesn't open the preview window (Sequoia Beta, 0.99.128.1.1-beta)

lobochrome

As written in a dupe I had opened here https://orionfeedback.org/d/9584-orion-preview-not-loading

This is still not resolved for me.

aghyad-deeb

Facing the same issue here

astruckm

aghyad-deeb Are you on the most updated Beta, or the RC?

jwells89

Can reproduce this on version 0.99.131.0.2-beta.

RichieB

This issue is not "Done". It has been broken for months now. Currently reproducable for every preview link on:

Version 0.99.131.0.2-beta (WebKit 621.1.2.111.4)
Build date Mar 11 2025
MacOS 15.3.2 (24D81)

goran2711

When clicking links in WhatsApp/Discord with Orion as the default browser, you just get this little bubble window and nothing else happens. If I change default browser to Safari, the link opens in a new Safari tab as expected.

I would expect it to either open the link in a new Orion tab, or to open a mini-browser in that little bubble.

Orion 0.99.130.2-beta, macOS Sequoia 15.3

Sequoia (15)

astruckm

goran2711 What are the values of "LinkPreviewWindowInitialWidth" and "LinkPreviewWindowInitialHeight" values in your Orion preferences? That’s located at ~/Library/Preferences/com.kagi.kagimacOS.plist, and the keys are in alphabetical order. With space bar preview:

Also, as workarounds, does typing CMD+T when that disfigured preview is showing create a new tab in the browser, and does clicking a link with Shift held down open a new tab in the browser?

goran2711

The height is 1, so maybe that's the issue! Not sure how this happened though, I only recently installed Orion.

Pressing CMD+T does open the tap in the browser. Same with shift-clicking, so at least there are workarounds for now! Thank you.

astruckm

goran2711 Thank you, that's very helpful!

RichieB

On my iMac the preview started working again with Orion version 0.99.131.0.2-beta while on my MacBook Pro the issue persisted with the same version. So I checked ~/Library/Preferences/com.kagi.kagimacOS.plist and on my MacBook Pro "LinkPreviewWindowInitialWidth" and "LinkPreviewWindowInitialHeight" were set to 20 and 1 respectively. On my iMac those keys were not there. Then I quit Orion and removed those keys from the plist, start Orion and preview is working again!

Like @goran2711 I have no idea how this happened. But at least I was able to fix it now!

TLDR:

Quit Orion
Remove the keys "LinkPreviewWindowInitialWidth" and "LinkPreviewWindowInitialHeight" from ~/Library/Preferences/com.kagi.kagimacOS.plist
Start Orion

astruckm

RichieB Thank you very much for posting that workaround for folks.

It also helps confirm that the forthcoming fix should indeed solve the issue.

sddawson

I can confirm that link previews don't work when using Stage Manager. Is a fix for this parrticular issue in the works?

astruckm

sddawson Links opened from external (non-Orion) apps in Stage Manager will always switch from the current app to Orion's window with the Stage Manager window switching animation. Since we thought that's a little jarring and seems to defeat the purpose of the preview, we disabled the preview for non-Orion apps in Stage Manager. So that is expected behavior.

Links opened in a preview from within Orion should work fine in Stage Manager, though (if not, then that's a bug).

sddawson

Oh ok. That’s a little disappointing. I’d be very happy to have a switch to the main Orion window when using Stage Manager, and for a Preview window to open there (with the option, of course, to then make the Preview open as a normal tab, and even better if you could nominate the tab group it opens in). What I don’t like is having an external link open a tab in whatever tab group was last being used in Orion at the time. It upsets the notion of tab groups for me. What might work is being able to nominate the tab group external links open in (but I still prefer the Preview option).

Thank you very much for the quick reply. I hope this can be reconsidered.

sddawson

As one more data point, the Arc browser also has the Preview-like functionality, and always just switches to the main Arc window before showing the preview, even when using Stage Manager. I’ve never found it jarring at all, and no more jarring than opening in a tab instead of a preview. But previews prevent tabs from clogging things up unnecessarily.

EDIT: Arc has the other little nicety that after you open an external link in a preview window, and you close that window, it switches back to the app you came from. Makes for a very nice workflow. But I'm not using Arc anymore - abandoned and Chrome-based!

astruckm

sddawson Thank you for the explanation.

Regarding:

EDIT: Arc has the other little nicety that after you open an external link in a preview window, and you close that window, it switches back to the app you came from. Makes for a very nice workflow. But I'm not using Arc anymore - abandoned and Chrome-based!

Orion's preview should behave the same: switching back to the app from which the link came after you close the preview either by clicking the "x" button in the upper left or with Command+w.

For the other requests, would you mind making another post, copying your thoughts, so we can more easily track them apart from this issue?