A desktop browser for Windows, macOS and Linux, built on Chromium through Electron and written in TypeScript. It has no telemetry, no ads, no sponsored tiles, no news feed and needs no account.
Status: early development. The current beta, 0.1.0-beta.6, is on the releases page; the roadmap lists every milestone.
- Browsing: tabs at the top, at the bottom or at either side, find in page, zoom per site, full screen, downloads, site permissions, popups and private windows; a page that cannot load says why.
- Your data: history with search, bookmarks with a bar, session restore, and the import of bookmarks, history and open tabs from other browsers.
- Content blocker with the default filter lists of uBlock Origin, on from the first start, with a switch per site.
- Customization: a settings page with search, themes and colors of your own, density, text size and fonts, a toolbar and a new tab page to arrange, search engines with keywords and
!bangs, and keyboard shortcuts of your own. - Look and tabs: tabs with the icons of their pages that animate, can be dragged, pinned and muted and have a menu of their own; an address bar that shows the site first with the security of its connection and suggests open tabs, bookmarks and visited pages; window controls in the top row of the browser.
- Privacy: no telemetry, HTTPS-First, DNS over HTTPS, blocked third-party cookies and clearing browsing data.
- Packages for Windows (NSIS installer, MSI), macOS (disk image) and Linux (AppImage, deb, rpm), for x64 and arm64. CI installs and starts every format on every change.
- Signed updates with delta downloads. After two failed starts, the previous version comes back on its own. deb and rpm packages update through APT and DNF repositories.
- Policies from the Windows registry, macOS configuration profiles and JSON files on Linux, read before the first window opens.
- Performance budgets, measured against a bare Electron app on all three systems for every change: start-up at most 120 ms and 25 % slower than the bare app (on macOS still a target: its CI runners show 10 to 60 %, and the gate there stops at 75 % until the shell starts faster), idle memory at most 60 MB above it (50 MB on macOS), idle CPU at most 0.5 % of one core. See performance.
- Security fixes from Electron ship in a patch release within 72 hours, critical ones within 24 hours.
On main now, and in the next beta, 0.1.0-beta.7:
- Dark mode: calmer lines and evener surfaces, mixed from the colors of the theme.
- Layout presets such as a compact and a zen layout, site information in the address bar and browser menus in an overlay.
- A command palette, tab search, sleeping tabs, split view, tab groups, workspaces, a reader view and picture-in-picture.
- Saved passwords and autofill.
Contributions are welcome. Read CONTRIBUTING.md to get started and SECURITY.md to report vulnerabilities.
Astela is licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0.