Oasis
By
@f
- 1 Devlogs
- 4 Total hours
Chromium-based focused on privacy and speed.
Devlog #001: Introducing Oasis
Posted: 2026-07-24
For the last few days I’ve been working on a new project called Oasis.
Oasis is a privacy-focused web browser with one simple goal: give people the modern web without Google’s ecosystem attached to it.
Today almost every browser is based on Chromium. Chrome obviously is, but so are Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, Arc and dozens of others. Chromium is an excellent browser engine, but Google’s version includes telemetry, background services, account integration, field trials, Safe Browsing requests, and many other features that not everyone wants.
The long-term goal of Oasis is to build a browser using ungoogled-chromium, removing Google’s services at compile time rather than simply disabling them with settings.
That is a huge project. Building Chromium is measured in hundreds of gigabytes of source code and hours of compilation, so instead of waiting until everything was finished, I decided to build Oasis in stages.
Version 0
The current version is built on Microsoft WebView2.
That means it still uses Microsoft’s Chromium runtime underneath, but it lets me develop everything surrounding the browser while the real engine is being prepared.
Even though the rendering engine is temporary, almost everything else belongs to Oasis.
Current features include:
- Multiple tabs
- A custom omnibox
- DuckDuckGo as the default search engine
- Native tracker and advertisement blocking
- A completely custom browser interface
- Keyboard shortcuts
- A custom new tab page
- Session tracker statistics
- Privacy-focused defaults
The browser currently idles at roughly 50 MB of RAM, while the executable itself is only around 1 MB.
Building the browser
Rather than using a standard browser window, Oasis draws almost the entire interface itself.
The title bar is custom, tabs live inside it, the navigation controls are hand built, and the new tab page is generated entirely by Oasis instead of loading a website.
The ad blocker also isn’t just a hardcoded blacklist anymore.
It understands Adblock Plus filter syntax and can load EasyList and EasyPrivacy filter lists, allowing it to block both network requests and cosmetic elements across thousands of websites.
Internally the browser indexes filter rules so every request only needs to compare against a very small subset instead of every rule in the list. That keeps blocking fast enough to happen on every request without noticeably affecting browsing performance.
The long-term plan
WebView2 is only the beginning.
Eventually Oasis will replace the entire browser engine with a custom build of ungoogled-chromium running through Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF).
That removes Google’s services at the source rather than relying on runtime settings.
The architecture will eventually look like this:
- Rendering engine: ungoogled Chromium (CEF)
- Browser host: Rust
- Filtering: Brave’s adblock-rust engine
- Interface: lightweight HTML/CSS frontend
Building that engine is by far the biggest part of the project and will probably take longer than everything written so far.
