Biba

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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:

1. Check out helium-macos and run its setup until Helium's patches are applied.
2. 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
   

3. Apply them (scripts/q push -a is a small quilt wrapper; set BIBA_HELIUM=/path/to/helium-macos).
4. 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.
5. 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.

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Made by @weristvlad with Claude.