v1.1.0 — Harbor: a new look, shareable search, and privacy in the open

softharbor.net gets its first big update: a new look, a display menu, shareable searches, a contact page — and two small, opt-out-able Cloudflare services, explained up front.

What changed for you

• A new look ("Harbor"). Cool chart-paper by day and a navy night theme, a calmer header, a home page that shows the whole catalogue at a glance (326 apps, 12 categories), redesigned app cards, and app pages with every fact in one place. It works the same with JavaScript off, and dark mode now follows your system even then.
• A display menu (the sliders button): theme, scrollbar (default, thin or hidden — scrolling still works) and motion. Asking for reduced motion turns every animation off.
• Searches you can share. Your query, filters and sort live in the address bar. "Best match" orders results while you search, and Vietnamese searches ignore diacritics.
• A contact page with one address per purpose: security, privacy, copyright, listing takedowns, legal, licensing, Code of Conduct, press, collaboration.
• Installable. The site can be added to your home screen or desktop, and the offline page now looks like the rest of the site.
• Fixes: smaller text finally renders at its intended size; search no longer applies a stale result after you clear the box; "Clear all" clears the search too; the language switcher marks the right language; pages no longer overflow sideways on phones; assets are cached properly, so repeat visits are faster.

Privacy — what is new

v1.0 said "no analytics". That changed, narrowly and in the open:

• Cloudflare Web Analytics counts page views without cookies and without storing anything in your browser. If your browser sends Global Privacy Control, it does not load at all.
• Cloudflare Turnstile runs once in the "Before you continue" dialog, only after you accept the terms, to tell people from bots — usually with no click. A pass is remembered for 48 hours. If it cannot run, you are let in anyway.
• The Privacy Policy now says exactly what each of these sees and what we keep. Because it changed, everyone is asked to accept the documents once more.

Under the hood

Every open dependency advisory closed (including a critical one in Astro), actions pinned, Dependabot configured. The only server code is one tiny endpoint that checks the Turnstile token; every page is still a static file. The build now refuses anything the page's security policy would silently block, and a Playwright + axe suite opens every page type in both languages and both themes on desktop and mobile. Full list: CHANGELOG.md.

Tóm tắt tiếng Việt

Giao diện mới "Harbor" (sáng và tối), menu hiển thị (giao diện, thanh cuộn, chuyển động), tìm kiếm có thể chia sẻ qua đường dẫn, trang Liên hệ, và có thể cài như ứng dụng. Về quyền riêng tư: thêm Cloudflare Web Analytics (không cookie, tự tắt khi trình duyệt bật Global Privacy Control) và Cloudflare Turnstile (chỉ chạy sau khi bạn chấp nhận điều khoản; không chạy được thì vẫn cho vào). Chính sách quyền riêng tư đã được viết lại, nên bạn sẽ được hỏi chấp nhận lại một lần.

v1.0.0 — SoftHarbor is live

softharbor.net is live.

A bilingual (EN/VI) directory of desktop software that is free, or
buy-once. Never subscription-only. You reinstall Windows, open one page,
filter by category and platform, and go straight to every official source —
instead of googling ten tools and hoping the top result isn't a typosquat.

The site hosts no binaries. It's a map, not a mirror.

What's in it

326 apps across all 12 categories — browsers, developer tools, IDEs,
graphics, audio/video, productivity, utilities, security & privacy,
communication, file management, gaming and system tools. 697 pages.

Each entry has:

• original two-line summaries in English and Vietnamese, written from
  scratch rather than pasted — which is what lets the dataset carry CC BY-SA
• links to the developer's own homepage, repository and download page
• a pricing badge (free · free-onetime · onetime), and an SPDX licence
  badge where the app is open source
• a dated security status with the VirusTotal permalink attached

On the security status

320 entries are clean. Six are deliberately held at unverified —
PeaZip, Tor Browser, ProtonVPN, Rufus, Synfig Studio and Windscribe — because
at least one scanner flagged something. They look like the false positives that
VPN clients, bootable-media writers and Tor builds attract as a matter of
course, but marking them clean anyway would be a guess dressed as a fact.

The scan permalink is attached either way, so you can open it and judge for
yourself. The site never says more than "no known warnings as of <date>".

Privacy

No analytics, no cookies, no third-party requests at runtime. Fonts, icons and
scripts are all self-hosted. localStorage holds your language, theme and
legal-gate acceptance, and nothing else.

Contributing

Suggest an app or report a bug with the
issue forms.
Read CONTRIBUTING.md
before opening a pull request.

Something wrong with an entry — a dead link, a pricing change, a project that
moved? That's the most useful report you can file.

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Code GPL-3.0-only · dataset CC BY-SA 4.0 · contact contact@softharbor.net

App names and logos belong to their owners. AI use in building this project is
disclosed at /legal/ai-disclosure.