Refrax 0.39.0

Download: Refrax-0.39.0.dmg

Import from Arc

Import brings Arc's spaces over as spaces, with their name, emoji and color. Pinned folders become pinned islands, folders inside them become sections, pinned tabs outside folders go to a "Pinned" island, and unpinned tabs go to the space's Tabs island. Favorites come too. Importing again adds only what is new.

Smaller things

• The Tabs island can be renamed and given an icon and color, like any other island: double-click its name, or choose Edit Island… from its ⋯ menu.
• The Save Password prompt stays open while you move the pointer to it, so Save can be clicked.
• The page fits the window again when the window shrinks.

refrax-ctl

• refrax-ctl and Refrax check each other's code signature before they talk, and a removed always-allowed app loses access on its next connection.
• exec runs under the default policy unless --permissive asks for more.
• The control socket opens only web addresses and never reaches a locked space; hotkeys it sends reach only Refrax.
• settings set can no longer turn off protections; dev cookies --domain must name one site; fetch honors its timeout.

Refrax 0.38.0

Download: Refrax-0.38.0.dmg

Tab menus

Right-clicking an island row opens a menu in a fixed order: where the page shows (Look, then Return; Open as Card; Show Beside This Page), copy and share, the tab's own verbs, then Close Tab with Close Other Tabs and Archive, then arranging (New Island, Move to Island, Move to Space), with the rare rest under More. Close Tab is one click again. The ⋯ menus on docked pages and on the page card follow the same order.

Hide the controls with ⌘S

⌘S hides the controls and the File Island past the window's edge, and brings them back to stay. Bring the pointer to that edge to peek; a download still brings the File Island out. Save Page As… moves to ⌥⌘S. Thanks to Elysia (#12).

Smaller things

• Holding ⌥ steps the page back to 95%, enough to mark the mode without moving the page around.
• The tour's Float a Page step says to hold ⇧ while dragging a row onto the page, which opens a card; a plain drop makes a new island.
• The tour's Keep an Island step lets you click the pin in the island's header, and Move the Controls lights the grip, the six dots at the foot of the controls.

Refrax 0.37.0

Download: Refrax-0.37.0.dmg

Islands

Tabs live in islands: floating glass lists beside the page, one per tab group plus one for the loose tabs. Hold ⌥ to see them, or keep them up with the rail's tabs button; pin an island to keep it after you let go.

• ⌥+scroll steps to the page above or below; a sideways push crosses to the next island.
• Rows drag to reorder, move between islands, join another tab side by side, or leave as a live card.
• Edit an island's name, icon and color together (double-click its name). Put one island inside another as a foldable section.
• Drop links, text addresses, .webloc files and other files onto an island; drag a row to Finder for a .webloc.
• Show Only: unread, playing sound, using the microphone, using the camera.
• Archived tabs have a home in the library drawer: restore, delete, empty.
• With the islands open, the arrow keys move through rows, typing jumps to a title, Space previews, Return opens, Delete closes.
• VoiceOver reads every row, with actions for close, move and open as card.

Split view

A tab splits into a two-by-two grid, side by side or stacked. Drop a row on any side of a page to place it there. Edit Split View (⌃⌘T) turns the panes into handles: drag a pane to trade places, drag the bars between panes to resize, grow a pane into an empty cell, or take a pane out as its own tab.

Shields

A new ad and tracker blocker built on adblock-rust, the engine behind Brave's, using uBlock Origin's lists and scriptlets. It works the same in WebKit and Chromium tabs:

• Network blocking, element hiding and scriptlets in every frame, including blank iframes.
• Protection from the first launch (the core lists ship with the app) and from the first page after an update.
• Scam and malware sites stop at a blocked page with Go Back and Open Anyway.
• The page card shows what was blocked, and clearly when Shields is off for a site, with a one-click Turn On.
• Settings › Privacy › Shields: lists, custom lists (HTTPS only; scriptlets only from lists you trust), and the sites where Shields is off.
• refrax-ctl page requests and refrax-ctl page explain show what was blocked and why.

uBlock Origin is no longer installed automatically. If you use it, it keeps working; Shields leaves cosmetic filtering to it.

Engines

• Sites can open in a chosen engine: Settings › Engines › Sites. YouTube opens in Chromium when the Chromium engine is installed, where it plays far more smoothly. "Always Open … in …" is in the reload menu and the View menu.
• The Chromium engine (155.0.8059.84, revision 2) adds Shields, find in page, a DevTools window, VoiceOver support and media suspension. This release needs that revision; Refrax updates it for you.
• Reload in Chromium no longer stalls behind the engine's signature check.

Extensions

• Extension badges and popups on the Control Island rail, keyboard shortcuts, and native messaging for desktop companions such as Bitwarden's, with signature-verified identities and a consent prompt for unverified ones.
• Extension storage survives relaunch; extensions stay within their space, and private spaces keep nothing.
• Installs and updates verify the package and keep an extension's data and permissions.

Also

• Command Lens finds Settings and each settings pane by name ("settings", "privacy", "extensions").
• Keys after ⌘-Tab reach the page and the islands again.

Refrax 0.36.0

Download: Refrax-0.36.0.dmg

Extensions you install get their permissions. An extension installed from a .crx or .xpi file, a folder, or a web store gets the permissions and sites its manifest asks for, as it would in Chrome or Firefox, so a uBlock Origin you installed yourself filters pages. Extensions installed by an earlier version get the same grant once, at launch. uBlock Origin also keeps filtering tabs restored at launch that you open long after it started, so YouTube ads stay blocked in them. These fixes are by Elysia (@pharmacykitty), as are the volume slider and EasyList Cookie fixes below. Thank you!

Fixes: YouTube's volume slider drags again, and drag-and-drop lists on other sites work with copy protection bypass on. The EasyList Cookie list downloads from uBlock Origin's mirror, since easylist.to stopped serving it. "Search with …" in the context menu searches in a new Refrax tab with your search engine (thanks to @Felixos21 for the report). The AutoFill menu on a login field with no saved passwords is compact. Feedback goes to kagerou.glass, and builds made from source can send it too. Crash reports include only crashes of the Refrax build that sends them.

Security: Refrax adds a new key for checking the signatures of its updates and engine downloads, beside the current one. This update is signed with the current key, later updates with the new one, and the current key will be retired once most installs have the new one.

Refrax 0.35.0

Download: Refrax-0.35.0.dmg

Telemetry is your choice. Refrax asks once what it may send: nothing, a daily anonymous check-in, or the check-in plus crash reports. You can change it any time in Settings → Privacy, which lists exactly what's sent and shows whether it arrived. Check-ins are signed with a key held in your Mac's Secure Enclave, and switching telemetry off deletes everything your install has sent. The alpha channel and invite codes are gone.

Also new: refrax-ctl can create spaces with their own isolated website data, address spaces by name, fetch a page as a space's logged-in session, and read a space's cookie store. Reading HttpOnly cookies or cookie values, and the new refrax-ctl cookies export, which hands session cookies to other tools through the Keychain, all need a per-space setting you turn on with Touch ID. In the AutoFill menu, "Other Passwords for …" now lists every saved login for the site.

Fixes: Reader opens without hanging, says when a page is too long for it, and Markdown export and Speed Reader stay responsive and handle emoji. Links opened while Refrax launches arrive in their tab, and saving a routing rule no longer crashes. youtu.be links and links clicked right after a reload open their page instead of a blank tab, and every page loads once. Content blocking catches a site's own ad requests, and uBlock Origin runs in tabs restored at launch. Switching tabs no longer leaves a blank white pane, clicks near the sidebar overlay's edge reach the page, the overlay reveals at full width, and right-clicking empty space in the compact sidebar opens its menu. Crash reports include the exception behind the crash, with page URLs trimmed to their site.

Refrax 0.34

Chromium, as a second engine. Refrax can now render pages with Chromium for the sites that need it. Download it in Settings → Engines, then switch any page to it from the reload button's menu, or make it the default for every page. It runs out of process, signed and notarized, and updates with Refrax. Chromium pages keep what makes Refrax Refrax: pinned tabs and favorites open other sites in a preview, tracking parameters are stripped, your redirects, routing rules and per-site settings apply, and refrax-ctl drives them like any other page.

Also new: websites can send notifications, with a permission prompt and a per-site list in Settings. Content blocking takes much larger filter lists and adds Safari's fingerprinting and link-tracking protections. Extensions run better — uBlock Origin now starts, and action popups open under the address bar. Link previews get a Quick Look–style toolbar.

The in-browser agent chat and Command Lens's "Ask Claude" are retired. Agents like Claude Code and Codex drive Refrax through refrax-ctl instead, where you decide what they may do; Refrax removes the chat's saved API keys and conversations.

Fixes: each site's saved password is found again, history and bookmark search return results, and inactive windows stop redrawing their background.

Refrax 0.33

External links now open in a Glimpse when no window is open, with an "Open in " button to promote them into a space — instead of doing nothing. Fixes a launch-time crash on external links, a tab-recording crash on macOS 26+, and a crash in the CLI new-tab command.

Refrax 0.32

• Autofill on Apple sign-in and other embedded logins. Passwords now autofill on pages whose login form lives in a cross-origin iframe — Apple ID, App Store Connect, embedded SSO. The suggestion popover appears over the field and fills correctly.
• Paste images and videos into editors. Pasting an image or video into a composer such as X or GitHub now creates an attachment, matching drag-and-drop. Sites that block pasting text are still bypassed.
• Fixed the empty toolbar platter. Hiding the sidebar in overlay mode no longer leaves an empty glass pill floating in the toolbar.
• Traffic lights and sidebar in compact mode and fullscreen. Compact-mode window buttons are reliably clickable, and in fullscreen the sidebar slides clear of the menu bar instead of overlapping it.

Refrax 0.31

macOS 27

• The sidebar sits flush against the page: no gap and no rounded corner on the content edge. macOS 26 keeps its inset look.
• The toolbar buttons are visible again and share one glass platter.
• Dragging the window by the sidebar works again.

Sidebar

• The address bar, the filter field, and the bottom controls use the system glass: the filter button, the space switcher, and the right-hand button group each sit on their own platter.
• The space switcher is a recessed track with a glass pill that slides to the selected space, like Safari's tab-group switcher on iOS. Inactive spaces are dimmed and their name tooltip is a capsule.
• Tabs, group headers, and the Command Lens row no longer darken on hover, and the bottom-bar buttons are smaller and drawn as bare icons.

Command Lens

• When the top suggestion completes to a deep link, the site's home page is the next row.

Refrax 0.30

Passwords, the easy way

Refrax now speaks Apple's Credential Exchange, so moving logins in and out is a few clicks instead of a CSV wrangle.

• Import from the Passwords app — the saved-passwords window has an Import from Passwords App… guide that walks you through Passwords ▸ File ▸ Export All Passwords ▸ Refrax. Everything transfers over Apple's encrypted channel, no file on disk.
• Export to another app — hand your logins to Apple Passwords, 1Password, or any manager that supports Credential Exchange, straight from the … menu.
• Import from the Passwords app is now the recommended path in onboarding; the Safari CSV export stays as a fallback.

Reach your passwords by intent

Type “passwords”, “logins”, or “keychain” in Command Lens (⌘K) to open the saved-passwords window.

Feedback goes to GitHub

Sending feedback (⌘T) now opens a pre-filled GitHub issue you review and submit under your own account — bugs, feature requests, and general notes all land in the open. Crash reports and diagnostics still report automatically in the background.

Also

• A Never button on the search-engine detection pill.
• Fixed a launch failure on signed builds and hardened startup against a missing iCloud entitlement.