I built the Soul Browser! It's a high-performance, privacy-first web browser built natively for macOS. Instead of
relying on bloated web-wrappers like Electron, I built the entire UI natively in SwiftUI and hooked it into the
Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) backend. This gives it the lightning-fast V8 JavaScript engine and Blink
rendering, wrapped in a beautiful, macOS-native shell.
The biggest challenge was wrestling with memory optimization and IPC (Inter-Process Communication). Because I
avoided Electron, I had to manually manage how the native Swift UI communicated with the underlying Chromium
processes. I spent a lot of time stripping down site isolation overhead and tuning the V8 heap limits so the
browser stays incredibly lightweight. We also had to build custom retry-logic to stabilize our local AI Codex
server
connection!
I'm incredibly proud of the UI aesthetics and the performance metrics. The browser looks and feels like an
expensive Apple product thanks to the frosted glassmorphism and native Swift animations. But more importantly, it
runs like a dream. Features like the AI Tab Grouper and native !Bangs integration make it a genuine power-tool
for
developers.
You can download the v1.0.0-beta directly from the Releases tab on GitHub!
Since it's a native macOS app in beta, you may need to right-click and hit "Open" to bypass the unverified
developer
warning. Try out the !w bangs in the address bar, or open 20 tabs to watch the AI Tab Grouper automatically
organize them for you!
- 6 devlogs
- 24h
