The flow for logging into Kagi has significantly regressed over the past year, and the most recent update that changed the welcome page URL from kagi.com/welcome to just kagi.com has made it no longer possible to work around.
Here’s what the login process looked like earlier this year:
- Go to kagi.com
- Tap “continue with Apple/Google/etc” or Autofill email login
- Authenticate login using biometrics
Here’s what it currently looks like:
- Go to kagi.com
- Tap menu icon
- Tap “Log In”
- Scroll down (on mobile, the other login options aren’t even visible until you do)
- Tap “continue with Apple/Google/etc” or Autofill email login
- Authenticate login using biometrics
For users who don’t clear their browsing cookies that frequently, this change is negligible. But for users who do, needing to go through all six of these steps at least once a day is frustrating.
Yes this can partially be improved by exclusively using kagi.com/signin, and waiting five seconds for the redirect every time you search once already signed in. Or by keeping separate bookmarks for kagi.com and kagi.com/signin, and remembering every single time if you are signed in or not and then selecting the right bookmark, but users shouldn’t have to do that. And besides, users that have kagi.com set as their homepage cannot do that.
Previously, I was working around this annoyance of kagi.com no longer redirecting to the login page but instead the welcome page by setting up a redirect from kagi.com/welcome to the Apple OAuth2 URL. But now that there is no way of differentiating kagi.com (the search engine) from kagi.com (the welcome page for the service), I have no options other than making this post complaining.
I understand that this change was made to make Kagi more welcoming for prospective users who are just learning about what Kagi is.
But I really hope that changing the welcome page from kagi.com/welcome to just kagi.com can be reverted. Since it makes easily accessing the “real” kagi.com much slower for actual users who are just trying to search something.
On a related note, I’d be surprised if a single person is benefiting from having the “login with QR” banner placed at the top of the login page on mobile, at the expense of needing to scroll down for other login options. I think it’s a reasonable assumption that many more users are logging in through OAuth2 with Apple/Google/etc, than logging in using a second phone/device to scan the QR on their first phone’s screen.
