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Roman's notes

Network and communication

Apps for browsing the web, managing network privacy, downloading files, reading feeds, email, and messaging on macOS.

Browsers

Section titled “Browsers”
  • Zen — Firefox-based browser with a focus-oriented, tab-grouping interface
  • Brave — Chromium-based browser with built-in ad blocking and privacy features
  • Firefox — open-source browser by Mozilla with strong privacy defaults and extension support

Ad blockers

Section titled “Ad blockers”
  • Wipr — content blocker for Safari using the native Safari Extensions API

Download managers

Section titled “Download managers”

  • AB Download Manager — free and open-source (Apache-2.0) desktop download manager written in Kotlin with Compose Multiplatform; a free IDM alternative that splits a file into segments and pulls them over several connections at once when the server supports range requests, plus download queues and schedulers, dark/light/black themes, and official Firefox and Chrome extensions that hand downloads over from the browser; builds for macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon), Windows, Linux and Android. Install on macOS from the author’s own tap — it is not in homebrew-cask core:

    Terminal window
    brew tap amir1376/tap && brew install --cask ab-download-manager

VPN

Section titled “VPN”
  • Viscosity — OpenVPN client for Mac and Windows with a status bar interface
  • Shimo — multi-protocol VPN client supporting OpenVPN, Cisco, and others
  • WireGuard — modern, fast VPN protocol with a minimal codebase; native macOS app available

RSS readers

Section titled “RSS readers”
  • Reeder — RSS and read-later client with iCloud sync and a clean reading experience
  • Cappuccino — news inbox that summarizes articles using AI
  • NetNewsWire — free and open-source RSS reader for Mac and iOS with iCloud and Feedbin sync

Email clients

Section titled “Email clients”
  • GotEmail — native mail app for macOS 15+ with a unified inbox for IMAP/SMTP accounts, live notifications, and on-demand AI drafts and thread summaries; AI requests go to OpenAI through the developer’s service. One-time license for all your Macs (accessed 2026-10-09).
  • Bloop.email — native mail app for macOS 15+ (Apple silicon and Intel) that merges Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, Yahoo and any IMAP account into one inbox; mail goes straight from the Mac to the provider with no vendor server, analytics or sign-up, and AI drafts, thread summaries and translation run on-device with Apple Intelligence (or your own OpenAI, Claude or Grok key, or a local model via Ollama). Ships a built-in MCP server with one-click setup for Claude, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and Antigravity — agents can search, read, label, archive and snooze mail and draft replies, scoped to the accounts you pick, with sending off by default. One-time license (accessed 2026-11-04).

Messaging

Section titled “Messaging”
  • Beeper — unified messaging client that connects multiple chat networks in one inbox