Ghostery's filter lists run inside the app, so ads and trackers never reach your Mac. Reader mode keeps an article's headline, text and pictures and drops the sidebars and sign-up boxes around them. Focus mode clears the tab strip and toolbar off the screen. Nothing to sign in to, and nothing is sent anywhere.
I would open a page to read one article and get a cookie banner, a video that starts on its own, a sidebar I never opened, a prompt to sign in, a prompt to sync, a new AI button. The article was in there somewhere, under all of it.
So I built Nook. It has a tab strip, an address bar, and four buttons, and that is the whole interface. Everything else it does is one shortcut away and stays hidden until you ask.
Nook ships with Ghostery's filter lists and checks every request against them before it leaves your Mac. A blocked ad or tracker never downloads, so pages arrive lighter and load sooner. There is nothing to install and nothing to configure.
Press the shortcut on a long article and Nook rebuilds it as one readable column: the text, the pictures, and nothing else. No sidebars, no sign-up box, no carousel of related links. Press it again and the original page comes back.
The tab strip and toolbar slide off the top of the window, so even a 13-inch screen shows a full page. Move the mouse to the top edge and they come back for a moment; press the shortcut again and they stay.
The menu button opens a single panel for all three. Bookmarks are written to a plain JSON file in your Application Support folder, so they are yours to back up or read. History lives in memory and is gone when you quit.
Drag tabs to reorder them. A tab playing sound shows a speaker you can click to mute it. ⌘⇧T brings back the tab you just closed, and ⌘1 to ⌘9 jump to a tab by position.
⌘F opens a find bar that highlights every match and shows the count as you type, so you know whether a word appears twice or two hundred times.
Cookies and cache are deleted when Nook closes. There is no account, no sync, no telemetry, and no crash reporting. The only things Nook fetches on its own are filter-list updates and the city shown on the new-tab page.
Most browsers ask you to install an ad blocker, then to sign in, then to turn on sync, then to try the new assistant. Nook blocks the ads itself and has nothing to sign in to. When you want the page to have the whole screen, the tab strip and toolbar hide until you move the mouse back to the top edge. Free, for Apple silicon and Intel Macs.