Stedding

Your haven on the web.

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Stedding Browser

An open-source, Arc-style browser built on Chromium. A sidebar with vertical tabs, Spaces that can keep their own sign-ins, folders and pinned tabs, a command bar, sidebar sync with no account, and one-click import from Arc. macOS and Windows. No telemetry.

Download for macOS (Apple silicon) Download for Windows Star on GitHub, 194 stars

Free and open source, BSD-3-Clause. Chromium 157. Watch the 51-second tour

Stedding in 51 seconds. No sound.
The Stedding window with the address row across the top: Back, Forward and Reload, and the address en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11 in a field centred over the page. On the left, the sidebar in sand: four essentials as cards (Wikipedia, MDN, DuckDuckGo and Hacker News), the Work Space with a folder holding a nested one, and tabs for Django, PyPI, a sample app on localhost:5173 and the browser’s own GitHub page. On the right, Wikipedia’s article on Apollo 11, with the photograph of Buzz Aldrin on the Moon. The Stedding window with the address in the sidebar. At the top of the sidebar, the window’s traffic lights, the sidebar’s toggle, Back, Forward, Reload and the menu, and under them a field reading en.wikipedia.org; then four essentials as cards (Wikipedia, MDN, DuckDuckGo and Hacker News), the Work Space, its folders and its tabs. Wikipedia’s article on Apollo 11 runs to the top of the window, with no address row above it.

An open-source alternative to Arc

Stedding is a desktop browser for people who liked the way Arc worked: tabs live in a sidebar, each project gets its own Space, the important sites are pinned and always where you left them, and Command T is one place to search, open a site or jump to any tab. Arc stopped getting new features in 2025; Stedding rebuilds that way of working on ground you control.

  • Open source, all of it.

    The browser, its interface and the build are BSD-3-Clause. No account, no company roadmap, nothing that can be taken away.

  • Built on Chromium stable.

    A small, documented patch series, so it follows Chromium’s security releases and runs the extensions you already use.

  • Private by default.

    No telemetry, no experiments, no Google sign-in or AI surfaces; third-party cookies blocked; the search engine of your choice.

The tour

  • The address, on top or in the sidebar

    Keep the address row across the top, or put Back, Forward, Reload and the address at the top of the sidebar and give the page the whole window. One switch in Settings, or Shift Command P and its name.

    The Stedding window with the address in the sidebar. At the top of the sidebar, the window’s traffic lights, the sidebar’s toggle, Back, Forward, Reload and the menu, and under them a field reading en.wikipedia.org; then four essentials as cards (Wikipedia, MDN, DuckDuckGo and Hacker News), the Work Space, its folders and its tabs. Wikipedia’s article on Apollo 11 runs to the top of the window, with no address row above it.

  • Spaces

    Each Space is a set of tabs with its own colour, icon and pinned sites. Switch with the chips at the bottom of the sidebar, with Control 1 to Control 9, or, on a Mac, by swiping across the sidebar. Drag a tab onto another Space’s chip and hold it there: the Space opens, and you drop the tab where you want it.

    The sidebar with the Space switcher at its foot: icons for five Spaces between the downloads button and a plus for a new Space, beside the project’s GitHub page.

  • The command bar

    Command T opens one bar for everything: a URL, a search, or the name of any open or archived tab in any Space. Type > (or Shift Command P) for every command with its shortcut.

    The command bar open over the Linux kernel’s GitHub page: a field reading Search or Enter URL above the open tabs GitHub – torvalds/linux, MDN Web Docs, DuckDuckGo and Hacker News, each with its icon and Switch to Tab.

  • Folders and pinned tabs

    Nest folders, drag one into another, collapse them, rename anything in place. A pinned tab remembers its home page: wander away and a slash shows it; Option -click the favicon, or choose Reset to Pinned Page, and you are back.

    Folders in the sidebar: a folder holding MDN’s CSS and JavaScript pages and a nested folder with the Python tutorial, followed by tabs for Django and GitHub’s trending page, with GitHub and MDN in the essentials row above them.

  • The rail, or nothing at all

    Command S collapses the sidebar to a column of icons; hover to peek at it. Or set it to hide completely: the page then takes the whole window, edge to edge, and the pointer at the window’s edge on the sidebar’s side slides the sidebar back over it. The address row stays; a setting hides it with the sidebar, and Shift Command D shows or hides it on its own.

    The sidebar collapsed to a narrow rail of icons along the left edge: the essentials, the tabs, and the Space switcher at its foot. The address row is still across the top, and the Linux kernel’s GitHub page fills the rest of the window.

  • Split view

    Drag a tab from the sidebar onto the page: the half it will take lights up, the two pages share the window, and the address row takes each page’s colour up to that page’s edge, with the window’s ground in the gap. Control Command N splits the tab with a new one.

  • Peek

    A link from a pinned tab to another site opens on a card over the page, inside the window. The pinned page waits under it, dimmed, until you close the peek with Escape or a click beside the card. Command O keeps the page as a tab, and Shift Command O puts it in a split beside the pin.

    A peek: a made-up mail page pinned in the sidebar, its Order 4182 link open on a card over the dimmed mail page. The card’s bar reads orders.localhost, with buttons to open it in a split, open it as a tab and close it, above the order’s delivery steps, shipping and items.

  • The site’s own panel

    The button at the start of the address opens one panel for the site you are on: copy its link or its title, mute it, picture in picture and zoom, dark pages for it, its cookies, permissions and extensions, and its own session.

    The site panel for en.wikipedia.org, open from the address at the top of the sidebar over Wikipedia’s article on Apollo 11: buttons to copy the link and the title, mute the tab and play picture in picture, the zoom at 100%, then Connection is secure, Camera, Microphone, Cookies and site data, Extensions, Shared session, Clear site data, a Dark pages switch and Site settings.

  • A colour for each look

    A Space takes one colour, or a pair: one for the light look and one for the dark. Edit Space… shows the sidebar in both while you choose. The window follows the system, or the look you pick.

    The Edit “Work” window over Wikipedia’s article on Apollo 11, on its Colour tab with Light and dark chosen: twelve colours in three shades, a saturation square, a hue bar and the hex field reading #783483, and the sidebar shown in the light look, green, and in the dark look, plum.

  • Private windows

    A private window wears a different coat, so you always know where you are.

    A private window: a graphite sidebar labelled Private with one New Incognito Tab row, beside the page that says You’ve gone Incognito.

  • Windows

    The same browser on Windows, the window’s own buttons at the end of the address row and Arc’s keyboard mapped to Ctrl and Alt.

    Stedding on Windows: the sidebar with four essentials (GitHub, MDN, DuckDuckGo and Hacker News), the Work Space with a folder holding a nested one, and tabs for Django, PyPI and the browser’s own GitHub page, beside GitHub’s trending page for Swift; the window’s minimise, maximise and close buttons end the address row.

The rest of what you know from Arc
  • Sites routed to their Space. From a tab’s menu, a site can always open in the Space you choose, wherever the link to it came from.
  • Little windows. A link from another app opens small, without the sidebar; Command O (Ctrl+O on Windows) moves it into your window.
  • Sleeping tabs and the archive. At launch only the tab you were on loads. Tabs can sleep after a time you choose, and idle tabs that are not pinned, and not in a folder, can move to the archive; both are off until you choose.
  • Local development tabs. A tab on your own machine’s server wears Arc’s dashed tape while it is on screen and, at the roomier row size, its host and port.

What Arc never had

  • Open source, with no account.

    Stedding is BSD-licensed and asks you to sign up for nothing: download it and use it. Arc requires an account, and its code is closed.

  • Spaces with their own sign-ins, in one profile.

    Give a Space an Independent session and it keeps its own cookies and site data, so one site can be signed in as work in one Space and as you in another, and the essentials you add there are that Space’s own; extensions, settings, history and saved passwords stay shared. One setting gives every new Space its own session, if you keep them all apart. Arc keeps sign-ins apart only by giving a Space a whole separate profile.

  • Dark pages.

    One switch turns every website dark from its first frame, with no white flash: the moon by the address row, or Option Shift Command D. Keep some sites light, or darken only the ones you list.

  • Apps from any page.

    Add to Dock on the Mac, Install page as app on Windows: the page gets a window and an icon of its own, and stays signed in as the Space it was made in. Arc does not install web apps.

  • Your sidebar on every computer, with no server.

    Pick a folder that syncs, such as iCloud Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox or a network share, or your own WebDAV or S3 storage, and each Stedding keeps its Spaces, pins and folders there, on a Mac and on Windows alike. Nothing goes through a Stedding account or server: there is none.

  • Links without trackers, and ad blocking, when you want them.

    Shift Command C copies a link without utm_ and similar parameters. One switch takes them off every link you open, too, and ad and tracker blocking is built in, from the EasyList and EasyPrivacy lists. Both are off until you turn them on, at the first start or in Settings.

  • Site cleanup in one step.

    Clear Site Cookies and Reload ( Option Shift Command R) signs you out of the site in front of you and nothing else; Close Duplicate Tabs is one command away.

Each feature has a specification in the repository, naming the test behind every behaviour.

Everything from Arc, in one click

The first start offers “Move everything from Arc”, on a Mac and on Windows: your Spaces with their colours and icons, the essentials row, pinned tabs, folders, open tabs, history and saved passwords, from Arc’s own files on your disk.

Nothing leaves your machine. On a Mac, passwords need one keychain prompt; on Windows, none. Run it again later from Settings; nothing is duplicated.

Arc shuts down on December 22, 2026. Moving from Arc has what comes over, how, and how Arc’s features map to Stedding’s.

Coming from Chrome, Edge, Brave or Vivaldi: the same step brings them in too.

Chrome, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi and Dia come in with each profile’s bookmarks, history and saved passwords, in one click; on a Mac each browser’s passwords need one keychain prompt. Safari’s export file comes in the same way, and Firefox through Chromium’s own importer. Bookmarks arrive as bookmarks, and the command bar’s Turn Bookmarks into Pinned Tabs makes them pins and folders. Settings → Stedding → Sync and import → Import from another browser opens the step any time.

The welcome flow’s import step: an Everything from Arc panel with checkboxes for Spaces, pinned tabs and essentials, other tabs, history and passwords and a Move everything from Arc button, and below it an Everything from Chrome panel with bookmarks, history and passwords and a Move everything from Chrome button.

Privacy is a set of defaults

  • No telemetry, no crash reports, no experiments, no identifiers. The new tab page is local and makes no requests.
  • No Google account surfaces. No sign-in, no Google services in the address bar, no AI sections in Settings. You pick the search engine at first start (DuckDuckGo until you do); search suggestions off until you turn them on.
  • Protective defaults on. Third-party cookies blocked, HTTPS-first, Global Privacy Control, quiet permission prompts, Chromium’s ad-measurement APIs off.

The privacy document lists every network connection the browser makes, with what each one carries, and records what a fresh profile actually contacted. Anything not on the list is a bug.

Keyboard first

The keys worth knowing, on macOS and Windows. The full list is in the repository, and inside the browser at Settings → Stedding → Shortcuts.

Keyboard shortcuts on macOS and Windows
Action macOS Windows
Command bar: search, a URL, any tab Command T Ctrl+T
Every command, with its key Shift Command P Ctrl+Shift+P
Fold or show the sidebar Command S Ctrl+S
Pin the tab in its Space, or unpin it Command D Ctrl+D
Jump to a Space Control 1 to 9 Alt+1 to 9
Next Space Option Command Right arrow Ctrl+Alt+ Right arrow
Most recent tab in the Space Control Tab Ctrl+Tab
Clear the Space’s loose tabs Shift Command K Ctrl+Shift+K
Split the tab with a new one Control Command N Alt+Shift+N
Dark pages on or off Option Shift Command D Ctrl+Alt+Shift+D
Copy the link, clean Shift Command C Ctrl+Shift+C
Screenshot the page Shift Command 2 Ctrl+Shift+2

Everything in Stedding

The complete list, on macOS and on Windows. Many of these are one switch in Settings → Stedding.

Sidebar and tabs

  • Vertical tabs, on the left or the right
  • Essentials and pinned tabs that remember their page
  • Nested folders, among the pins too
  • The address at the top of the sidebar, when you choose
  • A rail of icons, or nothing at all, with Command S
  • Rows at three heights, Comfortable to Dense
  • History and Downloads in the sidebar
  • Tabs under the tab that opened them

Spaces

  • A colour and an icon for each, or a colour for each look
  • Switch with the chips, Control 1 to Control 9, a swipe or the wheel
  • A Space with its own cookies and sign-ins, when you choose
  • Sites routed to their Space
  • Spaces and tabs that sleep, when you choose

Getting around

  • The command bar, Command T: a URL, a search, any tab
  • Every command with its key, Shift Command P
  • Split view, by drag
  • Peek: a pinned tab’s links open on a card over the page
  • Little windows for links from other apps
  • An archive for idle tabs

Pages

  • The address row in each page’s colour
  • One panel for the site: its link, sound, zoom, cookies and permissions
  • Dark pages, every website at once, Option Shift Command D
  • Apps from any page
  • Links copied clean, Shift Command C, or as Markdown, Option Shift Command C
  • Screenshots, mute and picture in picture by key
  • Local development tabs marked

Privacy

  • No telemetry, no account, no AI
  • Ad and tracker blocking, off until you turn it on
  • Tracking removed from the links you open, off until you turn it on
  • Third-party cookies blocked, HTTPS first, Global Privacy Control
  • One site’s cookies cleared and reloaded, Option Shift Command R

Sync, import and updates

  • Private sidebar sync through your own cloud folder, WebDAV or S3 storage, with no account
  • Spaces exported and imported as a file
  • Arc in one click, on a Mac and on Windows
  • Chrome, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Dia, Firefox and Safari in the same step
  • Signed updates, with a switch to turn them off

Download

Stedding 0.4.0 beta 18 — Chromium 157. Published .

macOS

Apple silicon (M1 or later), macOS 13 or later

Download for macOS 181.8 MB
File
Stedding-0.4.0-beta.18-arm64.dmg
SHA-256
1a8fa75a4f2cd0ea404440649cd267b8a52f3a3647df3d55111b57b8fc915a0f

Open the DMG and drag Stedding to Applications. It is signed with the project’s Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so it opens like any other app.

Check the download:

shasum -a 256 ~/Downloads/Stedding-0.4.0-beta.18-arm64.dmg

Windows

Windows 10 or 11, x64

Download for Windows 170.2 MB
File
Stedding-0.4.0-beta.18-win-x64.exe
SHA-256
a4366eb02e96755c511389f7bb6433ecfafc38b7a1fee9c9039cb8dacccca718

Installs for the current user, with no administrator prompt, over an earlier version if there is one; Stedding may stay open, and the new version takes over at its next start. If SmartScreen appears: More info → Run anyway, once.

Check the download:

certutil -hashfile Stedding-0.4.0-beta.18-win-x64.exe SHA256

The macOS image is signed and notarized. The Windows installer is not code-signed yet, which is why SmartScreen asks once. Once installed, Stedding updates itself: it looks for a new version on GitHub when it opens and every six hours, and Settings → Stedding → Updates turns that off. A Mac copy older than 0.2.0 beta 16, or a Windows copy older than 0.2.0 beta 19, needs one install by hand.

On a Mac, Homebrew installs it too. Click the command to select it: brew install --cask ysalitrynskyi/stedding/stedding

Intel Macs and Linux: not yet. Release notes · All releases · Install guide

Status

An early beta, fixed release by release. What each release changed is in its notes.

Known limits: the Windows installer is not signed yet. Safe Browsing is not active yet: its lists need a Google API key the builds do not carry. Netflix, Disney+ and Spotify need Widevine, which comes once Google licenses it.

Next: on Windows, code signing; then Linux.

Alongside them: the mini player in the sidebar, and a second press of a shortcut a web app also uses reaching the browser. Not planned, by choice: an account (Spaces sync through a folder your own sync app keeps or storage you set up, or move as a file), a bundled AI model, and a phone app. The full list of open work is in the repository.

Support Stedding

Stedding is made by one maintainer, in the open, and it has no ads and no search deal. Sponsoring it on GitHub pays for the time it takes: keeping up with Chromium’s security releases, fixing what people report, and building what comes next.

Sponsor on GitHub

Frequently asked questions

Is it a fork of Arc?

No. Arc is closed source. Stedding is Chromium plus a series of patches written for this project.

Is it signed? Is it safe?

Keeping it safe comes first. Stedding is built in the open on Chromium stable, follows its security releases, and is tested in daily use with help from everyone who reports a problem on GitHub. The macOS image is signed with the project’s Developer ID and notarized by Apple. The Windows installer is not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen asks once. Every release is built from the public repository’s patch series, and its SHA-256 checksum is published beside the file.

Do my Chrome extensions work?

Yes. It is Chromium; extensions install from the Chrome Web Store as usual.

Does it talk to Google?

For what Chromium itself does: component updates, Safe Browsing list requests (refused without a key, so Safe Browsing is not active yet) and network time. No telemetry, no Google sign-in, no experiment downloads; the Web Store only when you install or update an extension.

Will it update itself?

Yes. It looks for a new version when you open it, unless it looked in the past hour, and every six hours while it runs, reading a signed feed in its public repository. It downloads the update in the background and shows New Stedding Version Available at the bottom of the sidebar; a click restarts into it. Every update is signed and checked before it installs, and the check sends no account and no install id. Settings → Stedding → Updates turns it off. A copy older than 0.2.0 beta 16 on the Mac or 0.2.0 beta 19 on Windows needs one newer release installed by hand.

Does it have AI?

No bundled model and no chat in the command bar. An extension can add one if you want it.

Where is my data?

On your machine: ~/Library/Application Support/Stedding on macOS, %LOCALAPPDATA%\Stedding\User Data on Windows.

What does “Stedding” mean?

A haven. The name is shaped on the English word “steading”, a farmstead or homestead, which comes from “stead”, an old word for a place.

More questions and answers