Why this exists
Arc is gone. Dia, its successor, turned the browser into an AI product: chat in
every corner, your tabs sent off as "context", telemetry from half a dozen
vendors. We liked how Arc and Dia felt — the sidebar, Spaces, the calm card
the web sits in — and wanted that without the AI and without the tracking.
So Biba is that: the layout and the feel, on top of Helium, which already
strips Google services and telemetry out of Chromium.
This browser was vibecoded. It was built in a few long sessions by one
person and Claude (Anthropic's AI), patch by patch, on top of Helium. Expect
rough edges. It is a beta — use it, break it, open issues.
What's different from Helium
- Spaces. Separate sets of tabs in one window, each with its own colour.
Switch with a two-finger swipe on the sidebar, the dots at the bottom, the
Space name next to the traffic lights, or ⌘⌥1…9. Inactive Spaces are
frozen (no JS, no timers) to save memory and battery, and are restored after
a restart.
- The sidebar. Vertical tabs with roomy rows, pinned sites as tiles at the
top, hover a tab to close it or copy its link. Drag a tab up to pin it, down
to unpin, or onto a Space dot to move it there. ⌘S hides the sidebar (or
collapses it to icons — your choice in Settings › Appearance).
- The page is a card. Toolbar and page float as one rounded card over a
softly tinted window. The toolbar takes the colour of the page it shows.
- A quiet toolbar. "domain / page title", thin icons, no star, no install
prompts. Extension icons can be greyed out to match (Settings › Appearance).
- ⌘T opens a new tab with a centred search box: type an address or a
search, press Return. Just search — no AI.
- No AI anywhere. Nothing to opt out of.
- Updates via GitHub Releases (Sparkle, signed).
Everything else — the privacy work, uBlock Origin, the settings — is Helium's.
Huge thanks to the Helium and ungoogled-chromium people.
Status
Beta, macOS (Apple Silicon) first. Things that are still rough:
- Tab drag between the tiles and the list can still flicker.
- Pinned links (Dia-style rows above a divider) are new; dragging them
around may still misbehave.
- No Windows/Linux builds yet.
Install
Grab the latest .dmg from
Releases or
bibabrowser.com and drag Biba to Applications.
It is signed and notarized by Apple, so it opens like any other app, and it
updates itself from GitHub Releases (Sparkle, EdDSA-signed). Needs an Apple
Silicon Mac with macOS 12 or later.
To publish a release: scripts/release.sh <version> --publish builds,
packages, signs the update and uploads the DMG plus appcast-arm64.xml.
Building
Biba is a set of patches applied after Helium's, so you build it the way you
build helium-macos:
- Check out helium-macos and run its setup until Helium's patches are applied.
- Link this repo's patches into it and append them to the series:
ln -s "$PWD/patches/biba" helium-macos/patches/biba
grep -v '^#' patches/series >> helium-macos/patches/series.merged
- Apply them (
scripts/q push -a is a small quilt wrapper; set
BIBA_HELIUM=/path/to/helium-macos).
- Copy the branding:
resources/build_resources.sh, then each line of
resources/biba_resources.txt maps a generated file to its place in the
Chromium tree.
- Build:
scripts/build-helium.sh <jobs> <nice>.
The Chromium tree is ~100 GB; a full build takes hours.
Repository layout
| Path | What |
|---|
patches/biba/*.patch | Biba's changes to Chromium/Helium, one feature per patch |
patches/series | The order they apply in |
resources/ | Logo and the icon pipeline |
scripts/ | Build and dev helpers |
site/ | biba website |
License
GPL-3.0, same as Helium. See LICENSE.
Biba is not affiliated with The Browser Company, Arc or Dia. No code or assets
from them are used; the look is our own take on the idea.
Made by @weristvlad with Claude.
