Polaska
A glass tab strip that replaces your browser's own, in a window of its own.
Tabs in a window of their own
The strip lives in its own macOS window, made of glass, tracked to sit under the browser as it moves and resizes. You switch the browser's own tab bar off and this takes its place.
Both engines, one extension
Chromium — Vivaldi, Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc — and the Firefox family, through a Gecko build of the same extension rather than a second product. Verified in use on Vivaldi 8.1, Chrome 151 and Zen; Opera 134 was tried and cannot hide its own tab bar, so it is listed as not working rather than quietly omitted. On Firefox itself two things are still on the author, not on you: hiding the native tab bar needs a userChrome.css file, and a permanent install waits on a signed build from addons.mozilla.org.
Two halves that talk to each other
A Swift and SwiftUI app that owns the window and the glass, and a browser extension that bridges to the tab state — Manifest V3 on Chromium, and Manifest V2 on Gecko, where there are no service workers for a background page to live in.
Polaska moves your browser tabs out of the browser and into a window of their own, tracked to the browser as it moves and resizes.
What the first run actually requires, stated plainly because it fails without all three:
- Accessibility permission. Without it the app cannot locate the browser window and the strip never appears at all.
- Turning off the browser's native tab bar yourself. Polaska cannot do this
for you, and the reason is worth knowing: every Chromium menu item reports the
same accessibility identifier, the titles are localised along with the browser,
and the item's position moves between versions. There is no reliable way to
find the right menu item inside someone else's application. On Firefox it is
not a menu item at all but a userChrome.css file, which also needs the
toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheetspreference switched on; Zen has vertical tabs of its own in settings. - Granting the extension access to all sites, so it can read tab icons. The app can find them without this, but more slowly and not for every page.
Polaska and the browser's own tab bar
- What draws it
- the browser's own tab barThe browser, inside its own window, in its own chrome — the same on macOS as on Windows.
- PolaskamacOS, in a real window of its own. No Chromium browser can render its own tab bar as native macOS glass; that is the entire reason this exists.
- Across browsers
- the browser's own tab barEach browser's bar looks and behaves like that browser, which is what you want if you live in one.
- PolaskaOne strip whichever browser is in front, Chromium or Gecko, because it is one macOS window talking to an extension.
- Setting it up
- the browser's own tab barNothing. It is already there and already working.
- PolaskaYou switch the native bar off yourself, grant Accessibility and install the extension. Three steps, and the first one Polaska cannot do for you.
The browser's tab bar needs nothing: no permission, no extension, no second window, and it can never fall out of step with the browser because it is the browser. Polaska is a replacement you install and grant access to, and if it stops, your tabs are not visible at all. That is the trade, stated plainly because it is the honest one.
Latest change 1.2.0
The current version, and the most developed of the applications here. Per-release notes were not kept separately, so this entry stands for the state of the build rather than for a list of changes.
Numbered entries will start from the first version packaged for sale.