Blaze Browser

Fast. Private. Zero bloat.
A Rust-native, ad-free macOS browser built for people who want speed without compromise.

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Why Blaze?

Most browsers are Chromium wrappers — they carry Google's rendering engine, telemetry hooks, and memory overhead whether you want them or not. Blaze takes a different path:

• No Chromium. The core is pure Rust. The macOS shell uses Apple's WebKit as the rendering backend today, isolated behind a clean abstraction layer so a fully independent Servo-based engine can be swapped in without touching a single line of UI code.
• No ads, ever. A Brave-style Rust adblock engine runs natively in-process. Lists compile to a binary trie at startup — filter matching is sub-microsecond (p99 < 1 µs in benchmarks) with zero network round-trips.
• No telemetry, period. Zero data collection, zero crash reporting, zero analytics. What you browse stays on your device.
• Memory efficient. Tabs you haven't visited in a while are automatically suspended, freeing their memory. Background tabs cost almost nothing.

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Features

• 🔥 Sub-microsecond ad blocking - Rust-native filter engine, no extension overhead
• 🪶 Lightweight - Tab suspension frees memory automatically
• 🚫 Zero telemetry - No data ever leaves your device
• 🌙 Dark & light mode - Follows macOS system appearance instantly
• 📑 Full tab management - Create, close, pin, mute, reorder, move between windows
• 🔖 Bookmarks - Toolbar, bookmarks bar, and full manager
• ⬇️ Downloads - Native download engine with pause/resume/progress
• 🎬 Video & audio - YouTube, streaming sites, and any HTML5 media
• 🔒 Per-site ad-block exceptions - Allowlist individual domains with one click
• 🗂 Session restore - All windows and tabs come back exactly where you left them
• ♾️ Multiple windows - Drag tabs out to new windows, merge them back
• 🔍 Smart address bar - URLs, searches, and bookmarks in one field

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The Web Engine Abstraction

Blaze is not tied to any single rendering engine. The Rust core defines a single WebEngine trait:

pub trait WebEngine: Send + Sync {
    fn navigate(&self, url: &str);
    fn reload(&self);
    fn go_back(&self);
    fn go_forward(&self);
    fn evaluate_script(&self, js: &str);
    fn state(&self) -> EngineState;
}

Today, WebKitBackend implements this trait using Apple's WKWebView — giving full compatibility with every website while the native engine matures. Tomorrow, ServoEngine implements the same trait using Mozilla's Servo renderer in pure Rust. Switching engines is a single line of configuration. The Swift UI, the tab manager, the ad blocker, and the download engine have no knowledge of which backend is running.

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                  macOS SwiftUI Shell               │
│  TabStrip · Toolbar · Bookmarks · Settings         │
└──────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────┘
                       │  FFI (uniffi / Swift)
┌──────────────────────▼─────────────────────────────┐
│              blaze-core  (Rust)                    │
│  Tab manager · Session · Downloads · Events        │
└──────────┬───────────────────────┬─────────────────┘
           │                       │
┌──────────▼──────────┐  ┌────────-▼──────────────────┐
│  WebKitBackend      │  │  ServoEngine (in progress) │
│  WKWebView via FFI  │  │  Rust-native renderer      │
└─────────────────────┘  └───────────────────────────-┘
           │
┌──────────▼──────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  blaze-adblock  (Rust)                              │
│  Brave-compatible filter engine · < 1 µs p99        │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

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Architecture at a Glance

blaze-browser/
├── crates/
│   ├── blaze-core        # Tab, window, session, downloads, bookmarks
│   ├── blaze-engine      # WebEngine trait + shared types
│   ├── blaze-engine-servo# Servo renderer stub (engine-parity tests pass)
│   ├── blaze-adblock     # Brave-style filter engine
│   ├── blaze-net         # HTTP, range requests, download worker
│   ├── blaze-storage     # SQLite profile: history, bookmarks, settings
│   ├── blaze-media       # Audio/video state tracking
│   └── blaze-ffi         # uniffi bindings for Swift
├── platforms/
│   └── macos/            # SwiftUI shell + XcodeGen project
├── fuzz/                 # cargo-fuzz harnesses
└── scripts/
    └── build-dmg.sh      # Universal (arm64 + x86_64) DMG builder

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Performance

Metric	Result	Gate
Ad filter match (p99)	917 ns	< 100 µs
Filter engine cache load	3.5 ms	—
Cold browser start	< 500 ms	—
10-page RSS growth	< 64 MiB	—

Benchmarks run with BLAZE_PERF_GATE=1 cargo bench -p blaze-adblock.

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Install

1. Download the latest Blaze-x.x.x.dmg from Releases.
2. Open the DMG, drag Blaze.app to Applications.
3. Right-click → Open on first launch (unsigned build — Gatekeeper will ask once).
4. If the Dock icon looks stale after update, run killall Dock.

Blaze is currently macOS 13+ only (Apple Silicon and Intel, universal binary). Linux, Windows, Android, and iOS platform stubs are in the architecture but not yet wired up.

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Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. Please run cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets -- -D warnings and cargo test --workspace before opening a PR. The CI pipeline also runs AddressSanitizer, ThreadSanitizer, and fuzz smoke tests on every push.

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License

MIT — see LICENSE.