What’s new aboard.

Bearings now shows the status of pull requests and issues in private repositories too. And the browser can wear the warm colours of this website.

See private pull requests and issues

Press ⇧⌘K to find the pull requests and issues you’ve already seen, each with whether it is open, merged or closed. Once a Space is connected to GitHub, Settings › GitHub lists the accounts and organisations that share repositories with Escale, and Add Private Repositories… opens GitHub’s page to choose which ones.

If GitHub refuses a repository, Bearings offers Add Repositories… at the foot of the list, and asks again as soon as access changes.

Wear Escale’s colours

Settings › Appearance › Colours offers Escale beside Neutral: the sand, milk and brown-black ink of escalebrowser.com in light, umber and cream in dark. Each choice is shown as a small browser in its colours. Neutral stays the default.

Fixes

• Saved passwords are offered only on the site they were saved for (with or without www.), so other sites on the same shared hosting never see them.

Escale 0.6 brings GitHub into Bearings, the search bar. Find a pull request or an issue you’ve already looked at, see whether it is open, merged or closed, and go straight back to it.

Find a pull request or an issue in a keystroke

Press ⇧⌘K, or Tab after ⌘K or ⌘T. Bearings lists the pull requests and issues you’ve visited or still have open in this Space, one line each: title, repository, number, and an icon for open, draft, merged or closed. Return takes you back to its tab, or reopens it.

It works without an account: the status comes from GitHub pages you already have open.

Live status with a GitHub connection

Connect a Space in Settings › GitHub, or from the new last step of Welcome, and the lines on screen show their current status. Escale only asks GitHub about the few lines you’re looking at; what you type stays on your Mac, and the connection is kept in the Mac’s keychain, one per Space.

Improvements

• Each search in Bearings is paired with GitHub: Tabs with GitHub on ⌘K, New Tab with GitHub on ⌘T. Tab switches between the two.
• Bookmark environments now move with ← and →.

Fixes

• The extensions button and pinned extensions no longer disappear after switching Space, and a Space without extensions no longer shows another Space’s buttons.

Escale 0.5 puts the keyboard in your hands: every browser command can be found, reassigned or restored in Settings. And finding an open tab no longer needs the keyboard at all.

Change any shortcut

Settings › Keyboard lists every browser command, with a search and filters. Pick one and press new keys: Escale tells you if they’re already taken before replacing anything, and you can restore the defaults at any time. Menus show the shortcuts you chose.

⌥⌘↑ and ⌥⌘↓ move to the previous or next Space.

Search your tabs from the sidebar

A magnifying glass beside New tab opens the tab switcher, the same one as ⌘K. When the sidebar is folded, it sits beside the sidebar button.

Quicker from the keyboard

Opening, closing and switching tabs with a shortcut now animates three times faster; the mouse keeps its usual pace. Turn it off in Settings › Appearance. Reduce Motion in macOS always comes first.

Improvements

• Long tab and bookmark titles in the sidebar get more room, and keep both their beginning and their end when cut.
• Link routing accepts a pasted address, and a rule can start from a tab’s or a bookmark’s menu.
• Extensions that read text aloud use the current macOS voices, with pause, resume and a choice of voice.

Escale 0.4 makes moving in easier: it finds Chrome on your Mac and brings over its bookmarks and history in a click. And you can now take all your Spaces to another Mac.

Import from Chrome in a click

Import Data finds Chrome and its profiles by itself. Bookmarks, including those saved to your Google account, and history come over in one click each, with no export first. Passwords still come from a CSV exported from Google Password Manager.

Local profiles from Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, Dia, Firefox, Zen and Orion can be imported too.

Take Escale to another Mac

Settings › Import › Export Escale… saves every Space, with its bookmarks, tabs, history, settings and, if you choose, saved passwords, in one file protected by a passphrase. Open it in Escale on another Mac: the Spaces arrive beside yours, nothing is replaced, and you sign in to sites again.

Link Routing has its own page

Choosing which Space a site’s links open in now has its own page under Features, at the top of Settings. Each rule reads as site → Space, and a box lets you try a link and see which rule wins as you type.

Improvements

• Settings are drawn at the browser’s own size, in line with the tabs beside them.
• The Localhost panel says which local servers are no longer listening.
• ⌘-click Back, Forward or Reload to open the result in a new background tab.

Fixes

• A page that fails to load keeps its address, so Retry tries it again.
• Clicking into a sign-in box no longer freezes the window while macOS asks for access to the keychain.
• When macOS keeps Escale out of another browser’s folder, the folder picker opens in the right place, so one click on Open is enough.

Escale 0.3 shows a new version arriving and relaunches with your tabs as they were. A Google Meet call gets a window of its own, and Bearings learns which result you pick.

See an update coming

When a new version arrives, a button appears at the foot of the sidebar, below Settings: a clock while it downloads, a check once it’s ready. It opens a panel with what the version brings and Relaunch now. Your tabs come back as they were, and the first launch tells you once what changed.

A window for your Google Meet calls

A Meet call floats in a window of its own: the people in the call along the top, the shared screen beneath, and the call’s microphone, camera, presenting, raised hand and hang-up buttons along the bottom. It stays while the meeting lasts, even when you work in another Space.

Bearings learns what you pick

Type the same thing again and the result you chose last time comes up higher. Each Space learns on its own, private browsing learns nothing, and Clear History forgets it.

Browse, pause and search API calls

In the Network tool, ↑ and ↓ move to the newer or older call without going back to the list. Recording can be paused without losing the list, and the filter finds a word inside responses.

Improvements

• Each open tab and open bookmark in the sidebar has a Copy button for the address it is really at.
• A new download flies to the download button as a small plane.

Fixes

• The mini player’s buttons stay reachable with VoiceOver and full keyboard access.
• The selected tab no longer slips over its neighbour when a bookmark folder opens and shuts quickly.

Escale 0.2 gives the search bar a name, Bearings, and teaches it to find tabs, bookmarks and history by their words, however an address joins them.

Find a page by a few of its words

Type orchestrator handlers and Bearings finds orchestrator-handlers, orchestrator_handlers, /orchestrator/handlers or OrchestratorHandlers.java. The words can be spread over a page’s title and address, or over a bookmark and its environments: atlas dev finds the DEV environment of a bookmark called Project Atlas.

Tell environments apart on a shared address

When staging and production live behind the same console address, Escale can tell them apart by the start of the path. In Associate Environments…, choose Domain + Path and click the part that identifies each one, such as cluster-prod.

Know which Space is making sound

A Space’s icon in the rail wears a small mark while something in it uses the microphone, the camera, a video or sound, so you can tell where a meeting or a song is after changing Space. Changing Space no longer pauses what a page plays.

Improvements

• Select text with the mouse and Copy and Translate pop up where you let go. Turn it off in Settings › Web Pages.
• A Google Meet call can float in a small window while you work in another tab or Space.
• Clear, at the end of the Tabs heading, closes a Space’s ordinary tabs in one press; ⇧⌘T brings them back.
• The camera menu adds Select Area… to capture part of a page.
• The History panel opens at once, even with a long history.
• Back and Forward menus show each page’s title with a readable address.

A native Mac browser for the pages around your code, built in Swift on the WebKit already in macOS. No account, no telemetry.

A Space for each project

Each Space keeps its own tabs, pinned tabs, bookmarks, history, site data, saved passwords and extensions. A rule can send a site’s links to its Space before they even load.

Environments on your bookmarks

A bookmark keeps up to 20 named links, such as DEV, STAGING and PROD, picked from a compact selector. The name follows the page on that address. Labels are reminders, not a guard against acting on production.

Find, switch, inspect

⌘T searches open tabs, bookmarks and their environments; ⌘K switches tabs. The Network panel, on ⌥⌘N, lists a tab’s API calls with their headers and a JSON tree, and copies a call as cURL or for an AI assistant, with credentials removed.

Also aboard

• Chrome extensions from the Chrome Web Store, run on WebKit (macOS 15.4 or later).
• Imports from Arc, Chrome and other browsers, with a preview before anything is written.
• Tabs sleep when unused; a tab with an unsent draft stays awake.
• Passwords stay in the macOS keychain.
• Once a day, Escale checks for a new version and installs it for the next launch.
• Built on Search 1.0.1 by Office Commun (MIT).