Clear Browser

Clear is a macOS browser I wrote from scratch in Swift, on top of WebKit, the web engine already inside every Mac. Every surface is Liquid Glass, tabs live in threads you close when a task is done, pop-ups are grouped, and Claude is built in: it can chat about the page, do deep dives, browse for you and make artifacts, all through the Claude Code CLI already signed in on the Mac. A shield blocks ads, trackers, risky downloads and unsafe search.

It’s a beta. Version 0.2 works, but it’s still in development, so things will change. The download lives on the Clear page on AppleX, behind the AppleX password.

New in 0.2

• Profiles. As many as you like. Each one has its own cookies and logins, threads, history, an emoji or photo badge, a colour, a search engine, a backdrop and a layout.
• One sheet of glass. 0.1 put a blur behind every panel, which could get janky. 0.2 draws one backdrop for the whole window and the panels blend into it. There are five: Clear, Frosted, Tinted, Wallpaper (your own picture, blurred) and Solid.
• Ideas from Helium. More than 13,000 !bangs at the start or end of a query, cached so they work offline. Three layouts: Sidebar, Compact (tabs in the toolbar row) and Frameless (the UI hides until you touch an edge). Split view (⌥⌘N), a page frame, a minimal or centred address bar, hibernate other tabs, back to opener, ⌃Tab to the most recent tab, copy link (⌥⌘C), force paste (⌥⌘V), hidden cookie banners and per-site fingerprint noise.
• Agent windows. An agent from my AI team can browse in a window of its own, with its own pointer and a glowing edge, driven over a local API on the Mac. I can watch, take over, hand back or stop it. The hard limits are in the browser, not just the prompt: agents never log in, never type passwords, never pay, and each is locked to one account.

Since 0.2

On 26 October the agent windows moved out of Clear and into VibeEngine, a browser of their own, with their profiles and logins carried across. Clear is just a browser again, now at 0.2.1.

Why I built it

I wanted a browser that felt like a Mac app: light, native and quiet, with no second engine bundled inside it. And I wanted Claude in it properly, not as an extension, using the Claude login I already have, so the browser never touches an API key.

It also had to build with only Apple’s command-line tools, no Xcode. That meant picking the newest macOS SDK whose SwiftUI still compiles without Xcode’s macro plugins, and drawing a fallback for Liquid Glass on older systems.