Install Flecha on your Mac

Flecha runs on macOS 13 Ventura or newer, on Apple silicon (M1 or newer) and on Intel Macs. It is free and open source under the MIT license.

Download and install

1. Download the build for your Mac:

   • Flecha for Apple silicon (M1, M2, M3, M4 or newer)
   • Flecha for Intel

   Not sure which one you have? Open the Apple menu › About This Mac. “Chip” means Apple silicon; “Processor” means Intel.

2. Open the .dmg and drag Flecha onto Applications.

3. Open Flecha from Applications. Releases are signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so macOS opens them without extra steps.

On first launch a short welcome tour shows you around and offers to bring your data over from Arc and other browsers.

Updates

Flecha updates itself with Sparkle. It checks automatically, and you can check by hand from the app menu: Flecha › Check for Updates…. The download links above always point at the newest version, and every release, including older ones, is archived on GitHub Releases.

Make Flecha your default browser

Open Settings (⌘,) › General › Default browser and click Make Default. macOS asks you to confirm.

Links you click in other apps, such as Slack or Mail, then open in a Flechinha: a small, focused window that doesn’t pile up in your Spaces. Press ⌘O in it to move the page into the main window. To open those links as regular tabs instead, turn off Settings › Tabs › Open links from other apps in Flechinha.

Set up the helper (for importing and coding agents)

A browser can’t read other browsers’ files or open a local port on its own. Flecha ships a small helper for that (a native messaging host, with its own bundled Node) inside the app. You need it to:

• import from Arc, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and others
• let coding agents use Flecha over MCP

For now the helper has to be registered once by a script from the source repository:

git clone https://github.com/lucianodiisouza/flecha-browser.git
cd flecha-browser
chromium/scripts/install-native-host.sh --app /Applications/Flecha.app

With --app, the script builds nothing. It only writes a small manifest to ~/Library/Application Support/Flecha Browser/NativeMessagingHosts/ that points at the helper inside the app, and it allows only Flecha’s own built-in extension to talk to it.

Tip

Run the script before you first open Flecha if you want to import from Arc or another browser in the welcome tour. If you move Flecha.app to another folder, run it again with the new path.

Where Flecha keeps your data

Your tabs, Spaces, history, settings, cookies and Boosts live in your Flecha profile at ~/Library/Application Support/Flecha Browser. Flecha has no account and sends nothing about you anywhere; it only contacts flecha.dev to check for updates. See the privacy policy.

Uninstall

Quit Flecha and drag it from Applications to the Trash. To remove your data as well, delete ~/Library/Application Support/Flecha Browser.

Build from source

Flecha is a Chromium fork with a small patch set and a TypeScript shell. To build it yourself you need a Chromium checkout, Xcode and a lot of disk space and time. The full guide is in the repository README.