Search - a small, fast WebKit browser for macOS

Office Commun, a design studio, has released Search, a free browser for macOS that is deliberately small: the app takes about 3 MB on disk and opens instantly. It runs on WebKit, the engine already inside every Mac and the one Safari uses, so there is no second copy of Chromium to download or keep in memory. It requires macOS 14 or later.

Nothing in the way

The interface is a row of tabs, across the top or down the left, and the page. There is no toolbar, no start page and no account to sign into. One field does both jobs: type an address and the browser goes there, type a few words and it searches. Nothing typed in the field is sent anywhere until Return is pressed.

Pinned tabs shrink to a letter or an icon, and tabs from the last session return instantly. Reading mode strips a page down to the article, and the hide command removes cookie banners and overlays permanently for that site, before the page draws. The ad blocker is compiled once at launch and runs inside WebKit's networking before any request, so blocked trackers cost nothing to render. Extensions from the Chrome Web Store work too, on WebKit's own extension engine.

Passwords and private data

Sign-in details live in the macOS keychain, encrypted by the system and tagged as Search; the browser offers to save a password only after a login has actually worked, and never fills anything on its own. Saved accounts can be imported from Chrome, Arc, Brave or Edge. History and bookmarks are small JSON files in the user's Library folder. There is no sync, no account, no cloud and no telemetry: the only traffic is the pages you ask for and one request a day to check for a newer version.

Open source, written to be read

The full source is published on GitHub, so that anyone can read what a browser handling their passwords and history is doing. It is about 12,700 lines of Swift with no dependencies beyond what Apple ships: Vault.swift holds the keychain, Shield.swift the ad blocker, Session.swift restored tabs and Bench.swift the test socket. An opt-in setting lets scripts drive the running app through a Unix socket. The project is MIT-licensed and has more than 120 forks.