What is brows3r?

brows3r is a native desktop application for browsing S3 and S3-compatible object storage. It exists because the AWS console is slow, the AWS CLI has no preview, and every existing GUI client either talks to the network without authorization or hides what is happening behind opaque progress bars.

The design goals, in priority order:

1. Engineers feel at home. Keyboard-first. Seven view modes. A command palette. Inline previews for the file types people actually deal with at work (text, JSON, Parquet, PDFs, logs, archives).
2. Credentials never leak. AWS keys live in the OS keychain. The WebView has no access to them — every S3 call is mediated by Rust.
3. Operations feel local. Drag-and-drop upload. Recursive folder download. Bookmarks at any level. Inspector for bucket and object metadata. Multipart cleanup scanner.
4. Honest about what S3 cannot do. "Move" is a copy-then-delete with transactional rollback. Recursive operations are paged. "Open in editor" warns when the object is locked or read-only. No magic.

This site documents the user-facing features in Guide, the engineering decisions in Concepts, and the contribution process in Contributing.

Status

brows3r is in active development. The current focus is the v1 release — a feature-complete browser for AWS S3 and the two most common S3-compatible backends (MinIO, Cloudflare R2). Track progress in the GitHub repository and the changelog.

Quickstart

If you just want to try it:

git clone https://github.com/banduk/brows3r
cd brows3r
pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev

You need:

• Node 22+, pnpm 10+
• Rust toolchain 1.95+
• A platform that Tauri 2 supports (macOS, Linux, Windows)

The first build takes 5–10 minutes because Cargo compiles the AWS SDK and a few hundred transitive crates. Subsequent runs are incremental.

Once the app opens, follow First profile to point it at an S3 bucket.

Language

brows3r ships in six languages: English, Português (Brasil), Español, Français, Deutsch, and 简体中文. The interface auto-detects the OS locale on first launch; you can change it any time from Settings → General → Language. The preference is persisted.

Adding a new language is a 3-step PR — see docs/contributing/i18n.md.