Guillermo Rauch Rebuilds Mini Browser in Rust and Swift, Dropping Electron
Guillermo Rauch describes porting his Mini web browser from Electron and Bun to Rust and Swift, citing faster boots, better security, and a more Mac-native feel. The app uses the cef crate for Chromium, embeds an agent via fx acp, and exposes MCP tools over ACP.
Original post · 1 min read
I always wanted Safari-like UX but… Chrome 😁. Thanks to the 𝚌𝚎𝚏 crate, I can bundle up-to-date Chromium.
𝚏𝚡 𝚊𝚌𝚙 lets me embed an agent without bloating the app. It talks to my local fx CLI over ACP. fx can then manage the browser via an MCP server².
By ditching Electron, I was able to get Liquid Glass, faster boots, and a more Mac-native feeling. Little things like fine-grained focus and input control, which are nightmare fuel in JS, just work®.
Native is the future, both on the desktop and in the cloud. I suspect the entire software world will "nativify" faster than people realize, as DHH hinted at Rails World. Excited that Vercel's bet on Fluid will help support this, whether you choose to go Rust, Go, Zig, scriptc…
¹ Built on fx.sh with Opus 5.5 and Sol 6
² In the process I learned about agentclientprotocol.com/rfds/mcp-over-acp, which I'm now really excited about. This will allow a more secure and direct way to expose MCP tools