Feather
GitHub Download

Early alpha · free and open source

A small, calm browser for your Mac.

Feather is a native macOS browser built on WebKit. Sidebar tabs, quiet animation, and one promise it works hard to keep: it doesn’t lose your tabs.

Download for Mac View the source

Latest release · macOS 14 or later · Apple silicon · MIT license

The Feather window: a sidebar with a row of pinned tabs and a list of open tabs, and the start page showing the Feather icon and four bookmarks.

It keeps your tabs

Quit, crash, force quit: your tabs, pins and history are saved within a fraction of a second, written safely, and backed up. They are there when you come back.

Memory-conscious by design

Tabs you haven’t looked at in a while are unloaded and reload when you return, never while playing media, using the camera, or holding text you haven’t sent. No benchmarks yet, so no claims.

Native and private

Swift and SwiftUI on Apple’s own WebKit. No accounts, no analytics, no telemetry, no third-party code. It runs inside the macOS App Sandbox.

Everything you need, nothing in the way

A focused set of features, done carefully.

Sidebar and pinned tabs

Tabs live in a sidebar. Pinned tabs sit in an icon grid at the top: drag a tab onto it to pin, drag to reorder, drag back to unpin.

One address bar

URLs and searches in one place. It takes focus on every new tab, and a click selects the whole address so you can just type.

Crash-safe sessions

Rolling backups, quarantine for damaged files, and History > Restore Previous Session to undo a mistaken mass-close.

USB security keys

Sign in and register with a YubiKey or other FIDO2 key, PIN included. Apple doesn’t offer this to third-party browsers, so Feather speaks to the key itself.

Updates inside the app

Feather finds new versions, verifies the owner’s signature, and installs with one click, then reopens with your tabs. Nothing happens without your click.

Quiet, considered motion

Animations that respond to what you do, in light and dark. They switch off with macOS Reduce Motion.

The everyday basics

Bookmarks, local-only history, downloads, find in page, per-site zoom, printing, file upload, and camera, microphone and location prompts.

Default-browser ready

Make Feather your default browser and links from other apps open in it. It opens local HTML files too.

The one thing it is serious about

Your tabs are not lost.

Browsers crash, Macs restart, batteries die. Feather is built around the idea that what you had open should still be there afterwards.

  • Saved almost instantly. Within about a quarter of a second of any change, and again on quit, sleep and shutdown.
  • Written safely. Each save goes to a temporary file, is forced to disk, read back and compared, and only then renamed into place.
  • Always a way back. The previous save is kept, backups roll every ten minutes and before a sudden drop in tab count.
  • Nothing unreadable is ever overwritten. A damaged file is set aside, Feather restores from the last good copy, and it tells you.
  • One bad tab costs one tab. A problem with a single entry never takes the rest down with it.
Feather’s security key sheet: a key icon, the words Insert your security key, the site that is asking, and a Cancel button.

Sign-in

Your YubiKey works here.

WebKit doesn’t offer security keys to third-party browsers without an Apple entitlement. Feather talks to USB FIDO2 keys directly instead, and always shows which site is asking.

  • Register and sign in with a USB security key, with or without a PIN.
  • The site’s identity is checked against the page’s real address and the Public Suffix List, and only secure pages can ask.
  • Wrong PINs are never retried for you, and the sheet shows how many attempts are left.

Tested with a real YubiKey (firmware 5.7.4), results verified by Yubico’s python-fido2. iCloud passkeys, Touch ID, and NFC or Bluetooth keys are not supported; they need an Apple program Feather isn’t part of.

An honest early alpha

Feather is made by one person and tested on one Mac. Here is where it stands.

Works today

  • Daily browsing with sidebar and pinned tabs
  • Crash-safe sessions and backups
  • USB security keys, with PIN
  • Signed in-app updates
  • Bookmarks, history, downloads, find, zoom, print
  • Dark and light, with considered motion

Not built yet

  • Password manager and AutoFill
  • Extensions
  • Ad and tracker blocking
  • Private browsing
  • A download list, sync, multiple windows
  • Intel Macs (Apple silicon only)

Not tested

  • Other Macs and macOS versions (built for 14+, run on one)
  • Memory use compared with other browsers
  • Video calls and printing
  • Apps installed from a browser download, when updating

Get Feather

Latest release

Download for Mac

Free · MIT license · macOS 14 or later · Apple silicon only

Opening it the first time

Feather is signed ad hoc and not notarized, because notarization needs a paid Apple Developer account. macOS will say it can’t verify the app, and asks you once to allow it.

  1. 1
    Unzip and move it. Drag Feather.app to your Applications folder.
  2. 2
    Try to open it once. macOS will refuse and say it can’t be verified.
  3. 3
    Allow it. Open System Settings > Privacy & Security, scroll to the message about Feather, and click Open Anyway.

Already using Feather?

Choose Feather > Check for Updates…. From version 0.1.3, Feather updates itself with one click.

Prefer to build it yourself?

You need Xcode and XcodeGen.

git clone https://github.com/lumenworksco/-Feather.git Feather
cd Feather
xcodegen generate
xcodebuild -project Feather.xcodeproj \
  -scheme Feather -configuration Release \
  -derivedDataPath build build

Questions

Is Feather free?

Yes. It is open source under the MIT license, with no accounts, ads or paid tier.

Is it safe to run an app macOS can’t verify?

macOS shows that warning because Apple hasn’t reviewed the app, not because anything was found wrong with it. The honest answer is that you are trusting an individual developer. You can check the SHA-256 shown above, read every line of the source, or build Feather yourself with the steps above. Updates are signed with a key only the developer holds.

Is it built on Chrome or Firefox?

No. Feather uses WebKit, the same engine as Safari, through Apple’s own WKWebView. The browser around it is written in Swift and SwiftUI.

What does Feather send over the network?

The pages you open. It also downloads the small icon of each site you visit, to show it in your tabs, and asks GitHub for the newest release about once a day (you can switch that off in Settings). The address bar searches Google. There are no analytics, accounts or telemetry. Tabs, history and bookmarks stay on your Mac.

Will it support extensions or passwords?

Not yet. A password manager, ad and tracker blocking, private browsing and extensions are all on the list, in no promised order.

Why only Apple silicon and macOS 14?

It is built and tested on a single Apple silicon Mac, and Feather doesn’t offer an Intel build yet. It is meant to run on macOS 14 or later but hasn’t been tried on other versions.

Is it lighter than Safari or Chrome?

It is designed to be easy on memory, with unloading of tabs you aren’t using, but nobody has measured it against other browsers yet. Until that is done, Feather makes no claim.

How do updates work, and can I trust them?

Each release carries a manifest signed with a private key kept only by the developer. Feather has the matching public key built in and ignores anything that doesn’t verify, so a compromised download page alone can’t push an update. A small helper installs it after checking everything again, and rolls back if the new version doesn’t start. See the README for the details.

I found a bug, or a security problem.

Bugs are welcome as issues on GitHub. For security problems, please use GitHub’s private Report a vulnerability option on the repository’s Security tab instead of a public issue.