A little room to read.
A lightweight WebKit browser for Mac, with an iPhone companion.
Build · Continuity · Privacy · Contribute
Brou brings comfortable reading, a quiet interface and your saved web to Mac and iPhone. Its name means broth in Catalan: a few good ingredients, kept simple.
Maintained by Victor Correal. Based on Search by Office Commun, with its history and MIT notices preserved. The iPhone and iPad companion is maintained alongside this app.
Actual app rendering with a synthetic local page and disposable data.
- Reading without clutter. Dark Pages and text-only reading, alongside the reader inherited from Search.
- Keeping useful pages close. A minimal start page with bookmarks one click away. Spaces, tabs and bookmark folders on Mac.
- Continuing on iPhone. CloudKit bookmarks and a shared iCloud Keychain group for Brou credentials. Suggestions stay within the current host, so CMS, development and public-site accounts stay separate.
Brou retains Search's native WebKit foundation, content blocker and Mac extension support. It adds its own continuity, reading refinements, password scoping and maintenance fixes. See Brou 1.1.0 for the changes and upstream integration for attribution.
This first public version is a source preview. There is no public notarized Mac download or automatic updater yet. You can build and use the Mac app locally without our Apple account:
git clone https://github.com/victorcorreal/brou.git
cd brou
./build.sh release
open build/Brou.appRequires macOS 14 or later and full Xcode with a Swift 6 toolchain; the current source is checked with Xcode 27. Web extensions require macOS 15.4 or later. The build uses the checked-in icon and has no third-party Swift package dependencies. Without a signing certificate it uses ad-hoc signing for local use. A clean unsigned build has no shared iCloud capabilities.
Build and Apple signing guide · iPhone source · Verification results and limits
| Shared by the paired, correctly signed apps | Kept on each device |
|---|---|
| Bookmarks and bookmark folders via CloudKit | Open tabs, session and history |
| Brou credentials via iCloud Keychain | Cookies and website logins |
Both devices must use the same iCloud account and compatible signing identities. The current maintainer builds use CloudKit Development, fetching on launch, foreground activation and every five minutes. They are not a general iCloud service for unsigned builds. Passwords belong to Brou's own access group; they are separate from Apple's Passwords app. Read how sync works before configuring your own Apple team.
Cold launch selects an empty start tab while preserving previous pages. Returning to the running app keeps the current page. New-tab requests reuse the existing empty start tab; an extension that owns the new-tab page keeps its own behavior.
Brou adds no usage analytics or maintainer telemetry. Websites and the selected search engine still make network requests; the content blocker is not a promise of anonymity. iCloud is optional in a properly provisioned build. The inherited AI add-on is disabled. See the privacy and network notes.
Brou does not check or install Office Commun updates. Its inherited updater and publication scripts are disabled for normal use. Source publication is separate from Developer ID signing, notarization and a future Brou update channel. Never install a maintainer development profile from an issue or share your signing keys.
Report a bug with reproducible steps and synthetic examples. No browsing history, saved passwords or Apple account identifiers are needed. For security reports, use private reporting.
python3 Tests/run-ci-tests.py
Tests/AddressRegression/run.sh
node Tests/popup_gesture_script.jsThe Swift runner isolates all ten WebKit download journeys in separate processes. CONTRIBUTING.md explains additional probes, test isolation and upstream maintenance.
Brou is young. External adoption is not yet established. Feedback and public issues are the current evidence of use; upstream Search's stars and users belong to Search.
MIT. Copyright © 2026 Office Commun and Victor Correal. This is an independently maintained variant, not an Office Commun release. Original authors and commit history remain intact. CHANGELOG.md and ROADMAP.md retain upstream history; Brou's changes are in NOTES.md. The source package and targets are named Brou. Historical signing, storage and protocol identifiers remain to preserve data. Brand assets and provenance.