Straight Up Browser Is Out
The world did not need another browser, so I built one that does less. It's small, it's keyboard-driven, it's free, and it's out today.
2026-07-15
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The world did not need another browser, so I built one that does less. It's small, it's keyboard-driven, it's free, and it's out today.
The world did not need another browser. I built one anyway, and today it's out. It's called Straight Up Browser, it runs on macOS, and the download is smaller than most email attachments.
Every browser I've used lately wants to be a platform. Sync this, sign in to that, here's a sidebar of AI features, here's your shopping assistant. I don't want a relationship with my browser. I want a window: type an address, see the page, get out of the way.
So in January I started building one for myself. The name tells you the design philosophy. On your Mac it installs as Internet.app, because once it's on your machine, that's all it is.
The reason the UI can be this simple is that you're not supposed to touch it. The browser is keyboard driven from end to end, and the goal is to never need your mouse.
Hit ⌃Space or ⌘K, type a URL or a search or the name of a tab you already have open, hit return. That's the center of the app. There's a system-wide hotkey (⌥Space) that summons the same bar over whatever app you're in, so "look something up" no longer means "find the browser first." Every tab, page, and navigation action has a key command, and ⇧⌘H pops a cheat sheet of all of them when you forget one.
A few other things made the cut:
I did not write a browser engine. Nobody sane writes a browser engine. It uses WebKit, the same engine as Safari, so pages render exactly the way your Mac expects. What I wrote is everything around it, and I kept cutting until only the parts I use survived.
My favorite week of the project was deleting settings. At one point the settings window had controls that looked useful but weren't wired to anything real, the kind of toggle every app accumulates. I went through and either connected each one to actual behavior or deleted it. If a switch exists in Straight Up Browser, flipping it does something. That felt better to ship than any feature.
I built a lot of this with Claude Code, which will surprise nobody who reads this blog. The commit history is me and an agent arguing about what deserves to exist. Most of the time the answer was "less."
It's free. It's signed and notarized. There's no account, no analytics, and nothing phones home. The license agreement is six short sections you can read in a minute, which might be its most unusual feature.
The download is here, for macOS 15.6 and up. If something breaks, tell me. This is a version-one product from a team of one, so something will.