Raha
A calm, private, open-source browser where you decide which tabs get to spend your RAM and CPU.
Raha (رها) is Persian for "free, released, let go".
The idea
Every browser lets you open a hundred tabs. None of them lets you decide what
that costs. Raha inverts the deal:
- You set a cap — say, 6 live tabs. Everything else is asleep: zero
RAM, zero CPU, but right where you left it (thumbnail, title, history,
position in your folders). Click and it's back.
- The live bar always shows the truth — every running tab with its actual
memory and CPU, sampled from the OS. No mystery meat.
- You program the exceptions — pin a tab to keep it alive forever, give
*.slack.com an 800 MB allowance, keep *.music.youtube.com running by
rule. First match wins. Tabs playing audio are protected by default.
- Organization is spatial — nested folders, thumbnail grids, drag & drop.
A restart brings your whole tree back asleep: instant start, ~0 tab memory,
nothing lost.
The governor
The heart of Raha is ~150 lines of pure, exhaustively-tested policy
(src/shared/policy.js). In precedence order:
- Per-tab memory limit — a tab over its own limit goes to sleep, even a
pinned one (you asked for that limit). The active tab is never yanked —
you get a warning instead.
- Idle timer (off by default) — background tabs idle longer than N
minutes go to sleep.
- Live-tab cap — beyond the cap, the least-recently-used background tab
sleeps first. Pinned, audible, and active tabs are protected.
- Global memory budget (off by default) — if running tabs together
exceed your budget, LRU eviction until they fit.
Sleeping is real: the renderer process is destroyed and the RAM goes back
to your OS (why) —
not merely throttled or hidden. Navigation history survives; back/forward
work after waking.
Private by architecture
| |
|---|
| Telemetry, phone-home | No telemetry, ever. Raha itself contacts exactly one server: GitHub Releases, for the optional security-update check — on by default, one toggle to silence it (invariant #6, ADR-0008). Note the chrome also loads favicons directly from the sites in your tab list, including on a cold start with every tab asleep |
| Tracker/ad blocking | EasyList + EasyPrivacy via Ghostery's open-source engine (ADR-0009, MPL-2.0) — lists bundled with the app (never fetched at runtime), separate ads/trackers toggles, per-site off switch on the address-bar shield |
| Global Privacy Control | Sec-GPC: 1 + DNT: 1 on every request made by a page (toggleable). Favicon loads from the chrome itself do not carry them |
| Permission requests (camera, microphone, location, notifications, clipboard) | Asked per site, in Raha's own prompt — allow once / always / never — never granted silently, never a surprise system dialog; remembered answers are one click away in Settings (ADR-0013). Everything else a page asks for is refused, visibly |
| Default search | DuckDuckGo (Brave/Startpage/Ecosia/Google/Bing/Kagi selectable) |
| New tab page | Local. Loads nothing. |
| HTTPS | HTTPS-first for typed addresses, explicit opt-in for plain-HTTP fallback |
| Web content isolation | Chromium sandbox on, no preload/bridge in page processes (invariant #5) |
| What a page may open | Only http:/https:/raha:/blob: — a site cannot make Raha open or a fake login page in your chrome () |
Honesty note: Raha is Chromium under the hood (via Electron ~100 MB
installed). The "light" we promise is runtime discipline — 60 tabs open,
only your chosen few consuming anything — not installer size. Fingerprinting
resistance is on the roadmap and won't be claimed before
it's real.
Install
Grab the installer for your OS from
Releases: Linux AppImage/deb · Windows installer ·
macOS 13 or later, dmg (unsigned in v0.1: right-click → Open the first time).
Or start at the website: https://magronox.github.io/raha-browser/.
New here? Read the User Guide — install, first
five minutes, every setting, rules recipes, shortcuts, troubleshooting.
First launch opens a built-in one-minute tour (raha://welcome, revisitable
anytime).
Or run from source (Node ≥ 22):
git clone https://github.com/Magronox/raha-browser
cd raha-browser
npm install
npm start
There is deliberately no build step — what's in src/ is what runs
(ADR-0003).
Keyboard
Ctrl/Cmd+T new tab · Ctrl/Cmd+W close (on the grid: back to your last tab) ·
Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+T reopen closed tab · Ctrl/Cmd+L address bar · Ctrl/Cmd+F find in page ·
Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+R hard reload · Ctrl/Cmd+E grid/home · Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+B toggle sidebar ·
Cmd+Y (Ctrl+H) history · Ctrl+Tab cycle running tabs · Ctrl/Cmd+1…9 jump to running tab ·
Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+F freeze this tab · Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+S sleep this tab · Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+A sleep everything ·
Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+K pin (keep alive) · Ctrl/Cmd+, settings · F12 devtools
Status
v0.1.0 — young but honest. The engine (tab lifecycle, governor,
folders, persistence, privacy layer) is thoroughly tested — hundreds of unit
tests, a UI harness in real Chromium, an e2e suite on real Electron, and a
smoke self-test — and has been through a
pre-launch security audit against
Electron's official checklist. Expect rough edges; file issues generously. The
roadmap is public and numbered.
How this was built
Raha was written with agentic coding: an AI did much of the typing, a human
decided what to build, read what came back, and ran it. It is offered in that
spirit — take it, fork it, make it your own. The tests, invariants and
playbooks in this repo exist so that a mistake, human or machine, gets caught
before it ships.
Contributing (humans and AI agents)
This codebase is deliberately structured for safe iteration by both:
a pure, fully-tested core; a thin quarantined Electron layer; one-file IPC
contract; invariants that are enforced by tests, not vibes.
npm run verify # typecheck + lint + unit + UI harness + e2e — the definition of done
License & name
Code: GPL-3.0-only © 2026 Amir Basareh — forks stay open source.
The Raha name and bird mark are reserved: see TRADEMARK.md.
Why this combination: ADR-0002.
