I really like Kagi, but I'm starting to get that same sense of anticipatory melancholy I used to …

I went through the same thing with Dropbox. I loved how simple it was initially: just a folder that syncs. Then they started adding all sorts of "enterprise" and "family" features that cluttered up the simple use case it satisfied just fine for me. I understand that businesses need to expand and innovate. But it sure is nice to have a rock-solid reliable tool that just works long-term; something that you can depend on without it suddenly morphing into a weird new thing after you've built up skills and processes around it.

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.

Kagi and Orion both entered public beta at the same time[1]. Even if they didn't: it kind of seems unfair to indict this as an additional ambition. It's not as though browsers and search engines have an exotic relationship, and there's pertinent strategic threats that operating a browser protects against. [1]: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-orion-public-beta

Kagi founder here. I like simplicity too, but if that is the only thing I cared about I would have never attempted to build a paid search engine. We started working on the browser before we started working on search. There were many browsers and search engines before us, and all of them failed because you can not compete with an ecosystem company (Google) with a single product. If your customers use your search engine, but then use Gmail and Chrome, your main competitor has means (friction) with them to attempt to win them back over (and you are paid, they are free!) if you ever become more than a nuisance. This is why it was clear to me from day one that we need to offer a hollistic replacement for big tech for consuming the web - and search, browser and email (yes, we are building that too) account for 99% of consumption of the web. Yes, it makes our job everything but simple, but with…

> I have zero additional product wants or needs, > I'd really like all of this manic product energy to be going towards the core product What would that energy do if you don't need anything???

Proton has entered the chat... :) They used to be just about email. Now they have VPN a calendar, password manager, cloud storage and a google docs -style docs thing.