Search
A small, fast, quiet web browser for the Mac, by Office Commun.
Download for macOS → · macOS 14 or later · free · about 10 MB
Or with Homebrew: brew install --cask driceroland/tap/search
What it is
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 10 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 it does
- One field. Type an address and you go there; type words and you search. It finishes addresses from your own history and never sends what you type anywhere until you press Return.
- Tabs that stay out of the way. Pin the pages you keep open all day and they shrink to a letter or their icon. Tabs from your last session come back instantly and cost nothing until you click them.
⌘K lists your open tabs by name.
- Keep an important site running. Enable Keep selected sites awake in Settings › Tabs, then choose Keep This Site Awake in the site card. It prevents sleeping and automatic closure, even under memory pressure, at the cost of more memory. Private choices last only in that tab; manual closing still works.
- Two pages side by side. Turn on Split View in Settings › Tabs, then drag a tab onto a page or choose Tabs › Split Current Page. Drag the divider to resize the panes; the outlined pane receives page commands. Pairs and their widths come back with their Space, including after a restart.
- Reading mode.
⇧⌘R strips a page down to the article.
- Hide anything, for good.
⇧⌘H, then click a cookie banner, a newsletter overlay, a rail of "related" nonsense — it goes, and it is still gone on that site next time, before the page has drawn a single frame.
- An ad blocker that runs before the page. Third-party trackers and ad networks are stopped at the network level, so there is nothing to render and nothing to slow down. On by default, off per site if something breaks.
- Video that follows you.
⇧⌘P lifts the video out of the page into a small window that stays above everything, including other apps.
- Passwords, in your keychain. Search offers to save a sign-in once it has actually worked, and offers your saved accounts, and the Mac's passkeys for the site, under the field when you click it — the way Safari does, never filling anything on its own. Everything lives in the macOS keychain, encrypted by the system, readable only by Search. Bring yours in from Chrome, Arc, Dia, Brave or Edge in one click; nothing leaves the Mac. Keep them in Apple's Passwords app instead? Turn it on in Settings › Passwords and its accounts and verification codes come up under their box too.
- Light, dark, or the Mac's own. The frame and the pages follow.
- Bookmarks, history, downloads — each a panel, each searchable, each one keystroke away.
- Chrome extensions, without Chrome. Paste a Chrome Web Store link in Settings › Extensions, or open the extension's page in Search and press Add. It runs on WebKit's own extension engine — the one Safari uses — and where Chrome has APIs WebKit doesn't (bookmarks, history, downloads, side panel, offscreen documents, fonts, notifications, speech, OAuth sign-in), Search fills them in itself. They live behind the puzzle button; pin the ones you use often. Building your own? Load its folder as an unpacked extension and press Reload after each change, as in Chrome's developer mode. macOS 15.4 or later.
- Updates itself, quietly. Once a day it checks for a newer build, downloads it, verifies it is signed by Office Commun, and swaps it in for the next launch. Nothing restarts on its own.
What it doesn't do
On purpose:
- No extension you have to install to feel at home. Blocking ads, hiding clutter, reading mode, picture-in-picture and passwords are built in; extensions are there for everything else.
- No sync, no account, no cloud. Your tabs, history and passwords are on your Mac and nowhere else.
- No telemetry, no analytics, no crash reports sent anywhere. The only things that leave your Mac are the pages you ask for, their icons, and one small request a day to see whether there is a newer version.
- One window. Tabs are the only kind of "new" there is.
Privacy, concretely
| 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.
Apps you allow in System Settings › Privacy & Security › Automation can read the address and title of your tabs with AppleScript, and the name of the space and profile each window is in; private tabs are never shown, and a window with one in front shows neither name.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
