DailyXplorer/Lithium

A light, native macOS browser built on the system's WebKit (SwiftUI + WKWebView), no Chromium. Arc-style layout: pinned sites as tiles and tabs in a sidebar. Privacy first, with uBlock Origin's filter lists built in.
| At night, on a dark sidebar | Two tabs side by side | The reader |
These pictures are generated, not taken from anyone's browsing. ShowcaseShots draws Lithium's real window off screen, in an empty profile, and loads real sites in it. The sites, their logos and what they show belong to their owners.
## Download
Download Lithium for Mac (Apple silicon, macOS 15.4 or later), then:
1. Open Lithium.dmg and drag Lithium to Applications.
2. Open Lithium. The first time, macOS says it could not verify the app: Lithium is signed, but not notarized by Apple, which takes a paid developer account. Open System Settings › Privacy & Security, scroll down to Security, and click Open Anyway.
Lithium then updates itself. Once a day it asks GitHub whether a newer release exists, downloads it, checks that Lithium's release key signed it, and installs it when you quit (Model/Updater.swift). Settings › About shows where it stands, checks on demand, and turns the daily check off. A copy you built yourself has no updater and never asks.
## Build and run
Building needs a Mac with Xcode 27 (Swift 6.4); CONTRIBUTING.md lists the rest.
sh
./scripts/build-app.sh --run # builds .build/Lithium.app and opens it
./scripts/build-app.sh --install # installs it in /Applications
./scripts/test # unit and end-to-end tests
./scripts/test --filter BrowserTests # one suite
scripts/test runs the tests one at a time, in a throwaway home folder (the suites running a whole Browser only run in one), and stops them if they still run after 20 minutes (LITHIUM_TEST_MINUTES). Run side by side, as plain swift test does, the Browser suites share settings and break each other. A page a test waits for that fails or never loads fails the test after 30 seconds (Tests/LithiumTests/Support/PageLoad.swift) instead of waiting forever.
### Running tests
While iterating, run scripts/test-fast (same arguments, plus --jobs N and --list-shards). It runs the suites in about six processes side by side, each with its own home, temporary folder and settings, so the full run takes about as long as its longest suite (about 75 seconds instead of 5 minutes). Suites that play audio or video share one shard and run one after another. It prints one line per shard, the failed tests with the path of their shard's log, and the usual Test run with … tests summary. Before a merge, run scripts/test: it stays the reference.
On the first build, scripts/update-filters.py downloads the filter lists and converts them (into Sources/Lithium/Resources/Filters, not versioned). Run it again to refresh the lists, then rebuild.
.build is a symlink to a folder of ~/Library/Caches/Lithium/builds named after the checkout: iCloud-synced folders tag build products with extended attributes that break code signing, and two checkouts sharing one folder would test or ship each other's build.
## Protections
Network and cosmetic blocking. uBlock Origin (filters, privacy, badware, quick-fixes, unbreak, resource-abuse), EasyList, EasyPrivacy, Peter Lowe and URLhaus, compiled into native WebKit content rules by AdGuard's converter.