Search – A small, fast WebKit browser for macOS

A small, fast, quiet web browser for the Mac, by Office Commun.

Download for macOS → · macOS 14 or later · free · about 3 MB

Or with Homebrew: brew install --cask driceroland/tap/search

Search is a browser with nothing in the way. A row of tabs — across the top or down the left, your choice — and the page. There is no toolbar, no start page, no sidebar of suggestions, no account to sign into, nothing that wants your attention. You type an address or a few words in one field and you are on the page.

It uses WebKit, the engine already inside every Mac (it is what Safari runs on). That is why the whole app is about 3 MB on disk and opens instantly: there is no second copy of Chromium to download, update and keep in memory.

It was built by a design studio that spends its whole day in a browser and was tired of the ones that had become products. This one is a tool.

What Where it is Who can read it

Passwords The macOS login keychain, as ordinary keychain items tagged Search Search, signed by Office Commun. Any other app triggers the system's permission dialog.

History, bookmarks, open tabs, hidden elements Small JSON files in ~/Library/Application Support/Search/ You.

Cookies and site data WebKit's own store for the app The sites that set them, as in any browser.

Extensions Unpacked in ~/Library/Application Support/Search/Extensions/, their data in WebKit's extension store Each extension, within the permissions you accepted when adding it.

Anything else Nowhere. There is no server. —

A private tab (⇧⌘N) has its own cookie jar and leaves nothing behind when it closes.

⌘L address · ⌘K switch tab · ⌘T new tab · ⌘W close · ⇧⌘T reopen ⌘[ ⌘] back, forward · ⇧⌘[ ⇧⌘] previous, next tab · ⌘1–⌘9 jump

⇧⌘S tabs across the top or down the left · ⌘S fold the sidebar away · ⇧⌘B bookmark this page ⇧⌘R reading mode · ⇧⌘P float the video · ⇧⌘H hide something · ⇧⌘U what is hidden here

⌘F find · ⌘D duplicate tab · ⇧⌘C copy address · ⇧⌘V paste and go ⌘Y history · ⇧⌘J downloads · ⌘, settings · ⌥⌘L passwords

⌃Tab and ⌃⇧Tab walk along the row of tabs; Tab stays the page's, for moving through a form. esc puts away whatever is open.

Why the source is here

So anyone can read exactly what a browser handling their passwords and history is doing, build it themselves, or fix something that bothers them. The code is small enough to actually read — about 12,700 lines of Swift, no dependencies beyond what Apple ships with macOS, one file per concern.

macOS 14 or later, Xcode 16 / Swift 6 toolchain

swift build — runs the app straight from the SwiftPM binary

./build.sh — assembles a real, double-clickable Search.app in build/, ad-hoc signed so it runs on your own Mac

A build you make yourself won't be notarized or carry Office Commun's Developer ID, so the first launch needs a right-click → Open (or an allow in System Settings → Privacy & Security). That's expected — it's the same thing that happens with any app that isn't from the App Store or a notarized DMG. Your own build also keeps its passwords apart from a signed Search's: the keychain tells the two apart by their signatures.

./build.sh release dmg also makes Search.dmg / Search.zip. ./build.sh release ship additionally notarizes and staples — that step needs a Developer ID certificate and Apple credentials, so it only really does anything for Office Commun's own releases.

SwiftUI for everything drawn, AppKit for the handful of things SwiftUI doesn't reach on macOS (the window's title bar, dragging the window by an empty part of the tab row), WKWebView for pages.

One Tab per page. Its web view is built lazily — a tab restored from last session doesn't cost a process until you switch to it. That's most of why launching with twenty tabs is still instant. Each page runs in WebKit's own content process, as in Safari; a tab you close is really gone.

The ad blocker is a WKContentRuleList compiled once at launch and enforced inside WebKit's networking, before a request is made — zero cost at run time, unlike a JavaScript blocker.

Hidden elements are a per-site list of selectors injected as a stylesheet at document start, so nothing is ever seen appearing and vanishing.

Every colour is a light/dark pair in Design.swift, resolved by the window's appearance; nothing else in the code knows which mode it is in.

Extensions run on WKWebExtension (macOS 15.4+). Crx.swift fetches an extension from the Chrome Web Store's public update address and checks the CRX3 signature against the extension's id before anything is unpacked. Extensions.swift is the browser's side of WebKit's contract — tabs, the window, permissions, popups. ExtensionShims.swift adds, at install, a small script to the extension's worker, pages and content scripts: it defines the Chrome APIs WebKit lacks — userScripts, privacy, browsingData, sessions, the old FileSystem API and more — as calls answered natively by Search, and mends the places where WebKit behaves differently from Chrome: replies from pages that don't answer, listeners added after a worker starts, workers WebKit loses track of, members and constants it leaves out. Extension pages are served from chrome-extension://<id>/, the address they have in Chrome, so servers and sites recognise them. ./bench ext-* drives all of it from the shell against a test run. ExtensionNative.swift speaks Chrome's native messaging to hosts registered in Chrome's NativeMessagingHosts folders.

Sources/Search/ is one file per concern: Vault.swift is the keychain, Shield.swift the ad blocker, Curtain.swift the hidden elements, Session.swift what comes back at launch, Updater.swift the update, Bench.swift the test socket, and so on. There's no framework of its own to learn first.

Testing it without closing it

Turn on Settings › General › Let a script drive Search and the running app listens on a Unix socket in its own folder (readable by your user only). ./bench at the root of the repository speaks it:

./bench open https://example.com # a tab of its own, at the end of your row, marked with a flask ./bench wait 2e7e7e89 # until it has loaded ./bench text 2e7e7e89 # the page's text ./bench shot 2e7e7e89 out.png # a picture of it ./bench click 2e7e7e89 "button.go" # click, type, submit — through the page's own events ./bench probe # the window's state: open panels, a modal, every window ./bench close all

Bench tabs are never selected for you, never enter the session or the history, and go when the script says so. It is how this browser is tested while somebody is using it.

Issues and pull requests are genuinely welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md for how this is reviewed and what tends to get merged. The short version: small changes, no new dependencies, nothing that phones home. Found a security problem? Please report it privately, as SECURITY.md says.

MIT — see LICENSE. Do what you want with the code. "Search" and the app icon are Office Commun's; please rename a fork before distributing it under another name.