SlideBrowser

A mini browser that lives at the edge of your Mac screen. Press ⌘E anywhere — a panel slides in from the side with your pinned sites (ChatGPT, docs, mail…). Press Esc and you're back exactly where you were.

Download · Website · macOS 14+ · universal · Swift + AppKit + SwiftUI + WKWebView, zero third-party dependencies

Why

It's not a second Chrome — it's a web tool layer that appears and disappears instantly. The hard parts of a side browser aren't rendering pages (WebKit solved that); they're panel behavior, focus restoration, Spaces/multi-display, session lifecycle, and web compatibility. That's where this codebase spends its effort.

Features

• Global summon — configurable hotkey (default ⌘E), works over full-screen apps, on every Space, on whichever display your pointer is on
• Per-site global shortcuts — record your own key (e.g. ⌘⇧G) to summon the panel with a specific site active
• Sessions that survive — cookies/logins persist via WebKit's default data store; suspended pages restore history and scroll position (WKWebView.interactionState)
• Keep-alive + LRU — pin hot sites in memory, everything else is recycled under a budget you control
• Real browser behavior — target="_blank"/OAuth popups inside the panel, file upload/download, JS dialogs, web-process crash recovery
• Built-in page plugins — start with Translate Page; it sends the current URL to Google Translate only when you choose it
• Hidden chrome — no tabs or toolbars; hover the top edge or hit ⌘L for the address bar
• Private by design — no analytics, no history collection, hosts never written to persistent logs (policy)

Install

Grab the latest release, unzip, and move SlideBrowser.app to /Applications.

The build is not notarized yet, so the first launch needs one manual approval: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway. Building from source avoids that entirely.

Build & run

cd SlideBrowser
swift test          # 83 unit tests
./build.sh --debug  # assembles + ad-hoc signs build/SlideBrowser.app
open build/SlideBrowser.app

No Xcode project needed for development — plain SwiftPM. For App Store archiving, project.yml (XcodeGen) generates the project; see SlideBrowser/Distribution/RELEASING.md.

Architecture

Sources/SlideBrowserKit/     all behavior, unit-testable
  Panel/      NSPanel slide-in, state machine, geometry (ratio-based, multi-display)
  HotKeys/    Carbon RegisterEventHotKey (sandbox-safe, no Accessibility permission)
  Browser/    WebSession lifecycle, NavigationPolicy (pure function), popups, downloads
  Plugins/    built-in page actions, starting with Translate Page
  Sites/      site store (JSON), favicon fetcher (direct, negative-cached)
  Settings/   UserDefaults-backed store + SwiftUI settings
Sources/SlideBrowser/        thin executable bootstrap
Tests/                       swift-testing suites

The marketing site under website/ is static HTML/CSS deployed on Cloudflare Pages.

License

MIT