Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

In order to use Kagi as the default search engine in iOS Safari, you install their app and it then redirects requests to one of the search engines Safari does actually support.

In other words: you keep your default search engine set as Google or whichever. When you perform a search, the Google page appears for a fraction of a second before you're redirected to Kagi.

As well as being wasteful in terms of resources, this breaks the back button in the browser. If you want to return to the page you were on before performing a search, good luck with that.

Each time you navigate back from Kagi, you go to Google. But the Kagi logic then redirects you forwards to Kagi which is where you just came from.

In theory it might be possible to tap the back button multiple times fast enough to avoid the redirect. In practice, I use VoiceOver and the screen reader is far too unresponsive to make that feasible without turning it off and hoping I tap in the right place.

All because Apple have decided not to support such a basic feature as custom search engines.