µBrowser

Browsers and web apps have become so large and complicated that some people use them as their only application. I'm not that kind of person, I still live mostly outside a browser and my usage of a browser is to open it, do something and close it. Most browsers are not designed for this use case which made me increasingly frustrated about the current state of the art.

Thankfully, I found out that WebKit provides all the APIs I need to do the heavy work and I could build a small code on top of it to create a small, simple, quick and secure browser. This is what this browser is.

Features

• Shortcuts only. The browser doesn't have any button. Everything is done using keyboard shortcuts. As a mostly terminal user I don't want to deal with the mouse unless really required.
• Only HTTPS allowed. HTTPS Is quite spread already by default, but in this browser I wanted to make sure no unsafe pages will be loading.
• No permanent storage. Storage for cookies and everything else is temporary and for the current window only. Once the window is closed everything will be forgotten. This can be a problem for some websites that assumes that once logged in all windows share the cookies.
• Block advertising and tracking domains. There are various extensions to do this in the other browsers, but I wanted to have this builtin into the browser. We are using the lists provided here.
• JavaScript enabled by default. Unfortunately most of the web today requires JavaScript, this is why it is enabled by default. But sometimes it's much easier (or safer) to browse the web with JavaScript disabled, so with a quick shortcut it can be disabled.
• Custom User-Agent. The browser has its own User-Agent, but some websites enable features only for a specific User-Agent, so there is a shortcut to quickly switch to the Safari User-Agent if you need it.
• No tabs. This is probably a controversial one, but I wanted to keep things simple and this browser is not designed to have it "always on", so I didn't want to complicate things by implementing tabs.
• No downloads. This is purely because of lazyness, I didn't want to build the whole UI and background features for the downloads. If you need downloads you can use another browser.

Shortcuts

As this browser doesn't have any buttons it's important to know all the shortcuts available. Thankfully there are not that many and most of them are common for all browsers.

• Cmd+N: New window
• Cmd+W: Close window
• Cmd+M: Minimize window
• Cmd+Q: Close all windows

• Cmd+F: Find in page
• Cmd+G: Find next match
• Cmd+Shift+G: Find previous match

• Cmd+[: Previous page in history
• Cmd+]: Next page in history
• Cmd+L: Focus on the address bar
• Cmd+R: Reload page
• Cmd+Shift+J: Enable/Disable JavaScript
• Cmd+Shift+U: Enable/Disable Safari User-Agent

Download and Install

Here you can find the latest source code.

And this is how to install it.

$ make
$ sudo make install

It requires MacOS 14.0+ and as far as I know all the dependencies are installed by default on MacOS so nothing else needs to be installed. And since it's so easy to build and install there is no pre-packaged application.