Barc v0.0.9

Barc 0.0.9

Barc is a personal browser, built for my own taste. My goal is to reduce the browser's footprint while maintaining the original Arc feel.

Changes

• Background tabs now go to sleep. Barc's sleep check kept heavy tabs loaded indefinitely for reasons that never protected anything: text in a search box counted as an unsaved draft, frames from YouTube embeds or removed ads could not be checked, ad frames emptied by Barc's own blocker never answered, muted autoplay video counted as playing, and bot-detection scripts that open a WebRTC connection and never use it looked like a call. Each now has its own fix and test, and only real drafts, audible media and calls in progress keep a tab awake.
• On a copy of a signed-in profile with Gmail, YouTube, ChatGPT, GitHub, The Verge and The New York Times in the background and Wikipedia on screen, Barc 0.0.8 still used 1,488 MB after 15 idle minutes with five pages loaded. 0.0.9 used 392 MB with only the visible page loaded. An earlier run put a signed-in Gmail tab to sleep within about four minutes; 0.0.8 kept it loaded at 842 MB.
• New Settings → General → Keep page memory compact, on by default. JavaScript memory is cleaned up sooner instead of growing to about four times its live size first on Macs with 16 GB or more. A JavaScript-heavy test page settled at 253 MB instead of 554–838 MB with no measurable difference in processor time; on ordinary news sites the difference was too small to measure. Applies to pages opened after the change.
• With measurement logging on, Barc records why a tab that was due to sleep stayed awake.

Verification

The full suite ran 2,537 tests in 405 suites with no failures, after fixing the two saved-login suggestion tests that failed under full-suite load since 0.0.5. A transient-progress memory test still fails occasionally, as it does on 0.0.8.

Savings depend on the websites you keep open. Passkeys remain unavailable in this private build.

Download and install

• Barc-0.0.9-universal.dmg: open the disk image and drag Barc to Applications.
• Barc-0.0.9-universal.pkg: a standard installer that places Barc in Applications.
• SHA256SUMS.txt: SHA-256 checksums for both downloads.

Both installers support Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, with macOS 14 or later. Translation requires macOS 15; extensions require macOS 15.4.

Signing

This release is ad-hoc signed and not notarized by Apple. The installer package is unsigned. macOS may prevent first launch; read Apple's guidance before deciding whether to open it. No security settings are changed by the installer.

Included

• Arc-style sidebar, address/search launcher, Spaces, Favorites and split views.
• Arc import for supported tabs, folders, history, bookmarks, passwords and website data. Some sites require signing in again.
• Separate website identities for personal and work profiles.

Browser profiles, browsing history, saved passwords, cookies and local migration captures are not bundled. Automatic updates are not configured yet; download updates from this release page.

The source is licensed under Apache License 2.0. Original notices and third-party licenses are included in the app. Barc has no affiliation with Arc or The Browser Company.