The description at its website says it all: Breach is “a browser entirely written in JavaScript. Free. Modular. Hackable.” There’s really little to add: the Breach home page explains everything rather clearly. I don’t know anything about JavaScript, but since I love trying new browsers and love this kind of experiments, I just had to download Breach and try it out. 

The process is straightforward, fortunately. You download the OS X application from the home page and follow the ‘onboarding’ instructions once launched, that will guide you through the installation of the first essential module (mod_strip) to start using Breach, plus a second module (mod_stats) that sends anonymised usage statistics to the developers to help them improve Breach. As specified by the developers, The stats only include generic event types (no URLs, no personal data) and they are sent to Google Analytics.

Using Breach is, as expected, a bare-bones experience, but the browser feels fast and is surprisingly stable considering its alpha status. One little touch I find especially nice is that each tab extracts the dominant colour of its website, for better differentiation if you, like me, usually keep a lot of tabs open.

I hope the project will expand and gather a community of enthusiasts building cool new modules for it. On this page you’ll find a few (some already working, others in progress), so that you can start having fun with Breach.

(Found via the excellent Brett Terpstra.)