S3 Browser FAQ

Brows3 is a free, open-source desktop browser for Amazon S3 and S3-compatible object storage. It provides bucket and prefix navigation, search, sorting, previews, editing, transfers, object properties, and ACL controls through a Rust and Tauri application.

Yes. Brows3 is released under the MIT license with no subscription, trial period, account signup, or paid feature tier. The source and release artifacts are public on GitHub.

Brows3 publishes Windows x64 MSI, EXE, and portable ZIP packages. It also publishes macOS DMGs for Apple Silicon and Intel, plus Linux AppImage and Debian packages for x64 and ARM64. The documented minimums are Windows 10, macOS 10.15, and Linux with GTK 3.24.

Brows3 supports Amazon S3 plus S3-compatible services such as MinIO, Cloudflare R2, Wasabi, DigitalOcean Spaces, Garage, Backblaze B2, STACKIT Object Storage, and custom endpoints. Provider-specific behavior can vary when an implementation does not support an S3 API feature such as ACLs.

Use manual access-key credentials, select a shared AWS profile from your system configuration, or choose an AWS IAM Identity Center profile. Restricted users can open a known s3:// bucket path without requiring ListBuckets permission.

Yes. Brows3 0.2.44 identifies current sso_session profiles and legacy SSO profiles, then resolves cached temporary credentials through the AWS SDK. If the session is missing or expired, the profile dialog can run AWS CLI v2 browser sign-in for that exact profile and retest it.

Brows3 uses macOS Keychain, Windows Credential Manager, or freedesktop Secret Service on Linux. Linux 0.2.44 also migrates a still-live credential from the old volatile keyutils backend. Portable mode and native-keychain failures use a local plaintext secrets.json fallback, restricted to mode 0600 on Unix.

Yes. In 0.2.44, files at or above 100 MiB use multipart upload with adaptive part sizes, bounded memory, retryable parts, per-part progress, cancellation, and remote abort cleanup. This supports files beyond S3's 5 GiB single-PUT limit while staying within the 10,000-part limit.

Current-folder filtering works on the loaded listing. Deep search lists the selected S3 prefix recursively and is deliberately bounded to 100 LIST requests, 100,000 scanned objects, and 10,000 returned matches per search. It does not rely on a hidden full-bucket background index.

Bucket discovery is cached per profile for 30 minutes. Non-default complete-prefix sort results use a bounded in-memory session cache that is invalidated after writes or manual refreshes. Normal folder browsing remains prefix-aware and paginated. Brows3 does not build a complete bucket tree in the background.

The persisted text, HTML, and code preview limit can be set from 1 to 100 MB, with a 2 MB default. The Rust backend streams and enforces that exact bound even when S3 metadata is missing. Images, audio, video, and PDFs use presigned streaming and do not consume the text-preview allowance.

Yes. Uploads infer a MIME type from the object name, and Properties provides a validated free-form Content-Type editor with common suggestions. Metadata-only changes preserve supported tags, user metadata, headers, encryption and object-lock fields, and ACL grants. Objects above 5 GiB use multipart copy.

Yes. When a shared AWS profile resolves an endpoint_url, Brows3 0.2.44 enables path-style bucket addressing and compatibility checksum behavior, matching profiles created through Custom S3 mode.

Run winget install --exact --id Brows3Team.Brows3. The public catalog can briefly lag behind the v0.2.44 GitHub release while Microsoft's validation and indexing finish.

The 0.2.44 macOS artifacts are updater-signed and ad-hoc code-signed, but Apple Developer ID signing and notarization credentials are not configured for the project. macOS may therefore require the standard manual approval for an app downloaded outside the App Store.

The Downloads section links directly to the v0.2.44 DMG, MSI, EXE, portable ZIP, AppImage, and Debian packages for each supported system and architecture. Updater archives and signatures remain available on the GitHub release page.