Using WebKit doesn’t make something a Safari derivative. There are many WebKit browsers out there, Chrome used to be one them.

John Gruber had the Kagi CEO—Vlad Prelovac—on in December. I yoinked this from the auto-generated transcript in Apple’s Podcasts app:

> Orion is still in beta. We are nearing V1. There was so much to do.

> One thing that differentiates building on top of WebKit to Blink is that for Blink, there is Chromium, which is the web browser app framework. You get the entire browser out of the box. You can just change the name.

> And you have a browser for WebKit. There is no Chromium equivalent. You have to create every menu, every button, everything, which is why it took us six years to get where we are.

> It's basically written from scratch. And on top of that, we also decide to port web extensions, to port API to natively to WebKit. We're doing all these hard things that take a lot of time.

> And I know many people [aren’t] happy to see Orion is buggy. This extension doesn't work. Well, yes, it takes time to do this properly, but we are determined to do that properly.

> And of course, it also has the native ad blocker included and all these good things that a browser should have. But for various reasons, all the mainstream browsers cannot do. And yeah, that's the origin story for Orion.

Notably they have been porting in support for Web Extensions APIs that even Safari doesn’t support. You can see a full breakdown comparing Orion (Mac) and Orion (iOS) vs other popular browsers here: https://kagi.com/orion/WebExtensions-API-Support.html