Vincent
ff4a0c6bc4
Pairing decrypts a Chromium browser's cookie store (PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA1 against its Keychain key, then AES-128-CBC) and injects the result into WKHTTPCookieStore. Only the configured apps' hosts and their sign-in hosts survive the filter. Browsers are offered most-recently-used first, since the first entry becomes the default and someone with four Chromium browsers installed wants the one they actually browse in. WKWebView defines window.Notification but it does nothing: constructing one throws no error and shows no banner, so a page believes it notified you. Measured on the machine as `api=function shim=no` before the shim was made unconditional; `from page: Odoo - Test notification -> raised` after. Anything on a page can be right-clicked away. The rule is re-asserted on every navigation, because the injected script only carries a snapshot from when the view was built and a selector added since would otherwise come back on reload. The top bar is gone. Navigation lives beside the cog, the nav carries the traffic lights, and two-finger swipe goes back and forward. The seed is now the real app list, scoped to exact hosts so a Drive link inside Gmail switches rather than being swallowed.
Work
A desktop browser for one thing only: the web tools you work in. A left nav lists them, clicking one shows it, and links between them navigate inside the app. Everything else opens in your real browser.
Tauri 2 · Rust · React 19 · Tailwind CSS 4 · macOS
There is no address bar, no tab strip, and no way to reach a site that is not on the list. That is the point.
How it works
Every app is its own webview. Not an iframe — Google, Microsoft and most SaaS send
X-Frame-Options: DENY, so an iframe-based version of this app cannot exist. Each tool
gets a real child webview (Window::add_child), and they all stay loaded, so switching
keeps your scroll position, your half-typed draft, and anything counting down.
The shell measures, Rust positions. A child webview is a native view that takes no part
in CSS layout. The React shell leaves an empty <div id="stage">, measures it with a
ResizeObserver, and reports the rect; Rust sizes the active webview to it and hides the
rest. It also means a native view paints over anything the shell draws, which is why
opening Settings hides the stage first.
Links are routed by intent, not by URL alone. An injected script catches genuine user
clicks and target=_blank, and only those. A URL outside the app's own hosts is handed to
Rust over a made-up workapp-route: scheme — deliberately not Tauri IPC, which would mean
granting google.com the ability to call into this app. Rust then decides:
| Target | What happens |
|---|---|
| The current app's hosts | Nothing — ordinary navigation |
| A known identity provider | Stays inside, so SSO can complete |
| Another app on your list | Switches to that app and navigates it |
| Anything else | Opens in your default browser |
Redirects are never blocked. on_navigation returns true for everything that is not the
sentinel, because a strict navigation filter breaks every OAuth chain the moment it bounces
through accounts.google.com.
Sessions persist. Each webview keeps its cookies across restarts, so you log into a tool once. Every app also claims a real Chrome user agent by default, because Google refuses logins from anything it identifies as an embedded webview.
Pairing imports a browser's cookies. Settings lists the browsers installed, most recently used first, and pairing decrypts that browser's cookie store — PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA1 against its Keychain key, then AES-128-CBC — and injects the result into WebKit's shared jar. Only cookies for the apps on your list and their sign-in hosts are read; everything else is dropped before anything is written. macOS asks for Keychain permission the first time, which is the consent gate and cannot be skipped.
Google and Microsoft increasingly tie a session to the browser that created it, so those may still ask you to sign in once. After that the persistent jar keeps it.
Notifications work, with one gap. WKWebView defines window.Notification but it is
inert: constructing one throws nothing and shows nothing, so a page believes it notified
you and you never hear about it. It is replaced with a shim that forwards to a real macOS
notification carrying the app's name. Service-worker push in the background is not
covered — only notifications a page raises while it is open.
Anything on a page can be hidden. Right-click it and choose Hide this element, or
use the eye button in the nav to point at one (arrow-up widens the selection to the
parent, Escape cancels). Selectors are stored per app, listed in Settings, editable, and
reversible. The rule is re-asserted on every navigation and re-added if a single-page app
rewrites <head>, and cached in the page's own storage so a reload hides it before the
first paint rather than after it has flashed on screen.
Apps and groups
An app owns the exact host of its URL — mail.google.com, not google.com — or Gmail
and Drive would each swallow the other's links. Where two scopes match, the longest wins.
Extra hosts can be added per app.
Groups are for the nav only. Deleting one keeps its apps, ungrouped: deleting a folder should never be a way to lose the things inside it.
The nav collapses to a 72px icon rail that is still clickable, so switching apps never requires expanding it first. It is that wide because the macOS traffic lights have to fit inside it: there is no title bar and no toolbar, so the nav carries the drag strip.
Back, forward, reload and hide-an-element sit next to the cog at the top of the nav. There is no toolbar — two-finger swipe goes back and forward.
Running it
npm install && npm run tauri dev
Shipping it
Build, replace the copy in /Applications, and relaunch — one command:
npm run ship
No disk image; nothing here is being distributed.
Configuration
apps.json, under ~/Library/Application Support/com.vincent.workapp/. Hand-editing it is
supported — missing fields fall back to their defaults, and an app with no scope gets its
URL's host.
Tests
cd src-tauri && cargo test
Routing and config are pure and carry real tests: scope matching and its precedence, identity-provider passthrough, the routing decisions, sentinel round-trips, and config round-trips. Webview orchestration and bounds sync have no seam a unit test can reach and are verified by running the app.