Refrax – my Arc Browser replacement I made from scratch
Open the same tab in two browser windows. In Chrome or Safari, you get two unconnected pages. In Arc, one window shows a placeholder. In Zen, it silently creates a duplicate. In Refrax, the browser I built, both windows show the same page updating live. The same web page, in as many windows as you want. This shouldn't be possible. WebKit's WKWebView can exist in exactly one view hierarchy at a time. With macOS 26, Apple added a SwiftUI API separating WebView from WebPage, so you can end up with multiple views referencing the same page. But if you try it, your app crashes. WebKit source code…
Refrax – my Arc Browser replacement I made from scratch launched on March 22, 2026 with 12 votes, #1,060 of 23,380 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches.
In plain words
Refrax is a macOS browser that allows the same web page to be opened in multiple windows simultaneously, with all instances updating in real time. Unlike Chrome, Safari, Arc, and Zen, which either show duplicate pages or placeholders, Refrax displays the identical page across multiple windows. The browser works around WebKit limitations by using undocumented macOS APIs to separate the web view from the web page itself, enabling a single page to exist in multiple view hierarchies at once.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Refrax is a WebKit browser built from scratch after Arc was abandoned. Vertical tabs, spaces, compact mode, controllable by any AI agent if you wish. macOS · free · open source.
refrax is the browser i built when Arc was abandoned and nothing else felt right. i use it daily. you can too. i started using Arc in 2022. asked for the invite, learned the shortcuts, slowly got used to it. by the time it was abandoned and sold to Atlassian, i couldn't go back to Safari. none of the others were good enough. so i built the browser i wanted to keep. WebKit ships with the OS, but all you get is the rendering engine. everything else had to be made from scratch: tabs, history, bookmarks, passwords, downloads, extensions. i made it to my taste and for myself. so it makes no claims about speed or privacy. it shares its engine with Safari; the rest is window dressing, but better.…from refrax.website
In the maker’s words, at launch
Open the same tab in two browser windows. In Chrome or Safari, you get two unconnected pages. In Arc, one window shows a placeholder. In Zen, it silently creates a duplicate. In Refrax, the browser I built, both windows show the same page updating live. The same web page, in as many windows as you want. This…
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