Release notes

Changelog

Every public release of Grabbr, newest first.

2.4.3 · September 28, 2026 · Videos open in QuickTime on every Mac

Downloaded videos open in QuickTime, Quick Look and Photos on any Mac. YouTube’s best version of a video is usually AV1 with Opus sound, and Grabbr saved it as it came. Macs can only play AV1 with the hardware decoder Apple added in the M3, so on an M1, an M2 or an Intel Mac, QuickTime turned the file away as not compatible, whichever quality you picked. Grabbr now checks what your Mac can decode. Where AV1 won’t play, it picks the H.264 version, which YouTube offers up to 1080p. Where AV1 plays, you keep it. Either way the sound is AAC, which every version of macOS plays inside an MP4.
A second YouTube video is no longer refused as already downloaded. Once any YouTube download finished, the next YouTube link you added was turned away as a duplicate of it, whatever video it was. Grabbr compared links by their web address with the part after the question mark removed, and on YouTube that part is the name of the video, so every link looked identical. It now compares the video itself. This affected every version since 2.4.1.
Thumbnails and business license activation work on every Mac. Grabbr checked the security certificates of the sites it talks to against a file that only Macs with a developer’s copy of Python have. On most Macs that check failed, so the video thumbnails never appeared and a business license key would not activate (“Connection error”). It now checks them the way Safari does, against the Mac’s own trusted certificates. Downloads were never affected.
4K still means 4K. YouTube only offers 4K as VP9 or AV1, so on a Mac that can’t play AV1, choosing 4K gets you the VP9 version, which plays in IINA or VLC but not in QuickTime. Best Quality on those Macs now means the best version QuickTime can open.
VoiceOver reads the Tip button’s name in your language. It was read out in English whatever language Grabbr was set to.
The download no longer carries a label from the Mac it was built on. The disk image picked up a macOS privacy attribute from the build machine. Nothing showed it causing trouble, but it had no business being there.

Site update, September 27, 2026 · A new Business License price

A Business License for Grabbr is now $10 per computer, one time. It was $5. Personal use is still free.
A key you already hold is not affected. It keeps working, and there is nothing you need to do.

Site update, September 26, 2026 · Sentences that ran together, and YouTube’s “not a bot” message

Sentences on the download page ran together. A punctuation cleanup earlier this month swapped dashes for colons and commas without reading the sentences around them, so the page said things like “Drop a list of links: or a .txt file of them: onto Grabbr” and ran whole sentences together with commas. About thirty of them are punctuated properly again, both in the page you read and in the answers it gives search engines.
The page description said Grabbr removes ads. It does not. Smart Trim uses SponsorBlock to cut sponsor segments, intros and similar filler out of YouTube videos, and the description now says that instead.
The Firefox note counted two browsers. It said the extension for Chrome, Brave and Safari “both” come inside the app. There are three, and all three come inside the app.
The support page now explains “Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot”. YouTube shows it when a lot of downloads come from one internet address, which happens often on a VPN or a shared network. The new entry says what it is and how to get past it: turn on Browser cookies and pick the browser you are signed into YouTube with.
No change to the app.

Site update, September 23, 2026 · The privacy page now says update checks are counted

Update checks are counted, and the privacy page now says so. When Grabbr checks for a new version, that request reaches our server and we record it: which app it was, the version it reported, the date, the user-agent string of the request, and a one-way hash of your IP address that is re-salted every day. We keep it for one reason, to count how many installs are still in use. The privacy page said the opposite in its summary; it now says this there as well as in its “Update checks” section.
The earlier “no telemetry” wording was inaccurate. The entry below of August 12, 2026 says the line about there being no account and no telemetry “was accurate and is unchanged”. It was not accurate: the checks were already being counted when it was written. That entry is left as it stands, because it is a record of what was published on the day; this one corrects it.
Nothing about your files changed, and nothing about them is sent. There is still no account, the automatic check can still be turned off, and Grabbr goes on working either way.
No change to the app.

Site update, September 15, 2026 · The support page still asked for Sonoma

The support page still said Grabbr needs macOS 14 Sonoma. Version 2.4.1 lowered the requirement to macOS 13 Ventura on September 14, and the download page was updated to match, but the support page was not. It gave the old floor in both of the places it appears: the Installation & Requirements answer a visitor reads, and the structured data that search engines and assistants read. Someone on Ventura asking whether Grabbr would run on their Mac could be told by either one that it would not. Both now say macOS 13 Ventura or later.
Nothing about the app changed. Grabbr 2.4.1 has run on macOS 13 Ventura since the day it shipped; only the page describing it was out of date.

2.4.2 · September 15, 2026 · Brave is supported properly, and your settings survive a damaged file

Brave has its own place in the extension setup. The setup sheet offered Chrome, Safari and Firefox, and both of its buttons opened Chrome's extensions page regardless. On a Mac with both installed, a Brave user following Grabbr's own instructions was handed Chrome's page. Brave now has its own tab with its own wording and its own address, and switching language no longer hands a Brave user instructions about Chrome.
The extension sheet opens on the browser you actually use. It opened on Chrome's tab for everybody, which is the one browser a Brave, Safari or Firefox user does not need instructions for: they landed on Chrome's steps and had to notice the tabs to find their own. Grabbr now asks macOS which browser opens your links and starts there. Anything it has no tab for keeps the Chrome steps, which are the ones that apply to the other Chromium browsers anyway.
A damaged settings file is kept instead of being destroyed. An unreadable preferences file was treated exactly like a missing one, so Grabbr started on defaults and the next save wrote over the damaged copy, losing everything you had chosen within seconds of a launch that looked completely normal. Such a file is now renamed aside so it can be recovered. A file the system merely refuses to open, usually a permissions problem rather than damage, is left untouched as before.

2.4.1 · September 14, 2026 · Runs on macOS 13 Ventura again

Ventura is supported again. Grabbr now runs on macOS 13 Ventura and later, where it previously required macOS 14 Sonoma. Nothing in the app ever needed Sonoma: the floor came from the Python runtime bundled in at build time, which has been rebuilt against one targeting macOS 10.13 on Intel and 11.0 on Apple Silicon. Intel and Apple Silicon Macs are both supported, as before.

2.4.0 · September 8, 2026 · A menu bar, a Settings window, and a queue you can work from the keyboard

Everything Grabbr could do was reachable only from the window itself, and only with a pointer. This release puts those things where a Mac app keeps them, and makes the download queue work from the keyboard.

The update notice can only ever open a twoplus11.com page. When a new version exists, Grabbr offers a button that opens the download page, and which page that is was whatever the update server said it was. Nothing checked it, so a spoofed or compromised server could have pointed that button at any site it liked, wearing the credibility of a signed app. The address is now checked against the real host before anything opens, and a lookalike like twoplus11.com.example.net does not pass.
Grabbr finally has a menu bar. The App menu now holds About Grabbr, Settings (⌘,), Check for Updates and License, and there is a Help menu with Grabbr Help, Keyboard Shortcuts (⌘/), Report a Problem, Leave a Review and What’s New. Every one of those was reachable before only from the small row of links at the bottom of the window, and ⌘,, the first key most Mac users press when they want to change something, did nothing at all. The menu is translated along with the rest of the app when you switch languages.
A Settings window, so app-wide choices are not mixed in with download options. Appearance (System, Light or Dark), Language, and a way into the keyboard shortcuts. What you download and how stays in the sidebar, where you are already looking when you queue something, and Settings says so.
You can now work the download queue without a mouse. Up and Down move through it with the selected download clearly marked, Space previews a finished one with Quick Look the way Finder does, ⌘⌫ removes it or cancels it, and ⇧F10 (or a right-click) opens its menu: Open, Quick Look, Reveal in Finder, Copy URL, Copy log, Retry, Move to top, Remove. Every one of those was previously a small round button you had to hit with a pointer.
A welcome screen on the very first launch. One screen that says what Grabbr does and where to put a link, then gets out of the way and never comes back. Before this, the first thing a new user saw was a page about yt-dlp and SponsorBlock, which explained Grabbr’s ingredients before anything explained Grabbr.
An About window with the version, the build number and the links. The build number is what a bug report needs to identify exactly which copy of Grabbr you are running.
A Copy log button on every download’s log panel, so a failure can be pasted into a report in one move instead of being selected by hand.

Changed

Grabbr’s window remembers how big you made it and where you put it. It reopened at the same default size in the middle of the screen every single launch.
Searching your history now says how much it is hiding, for example “Showing 3 of 148”, so a short list never leaves you wondering whether that is everything.
Messages that pop up at the bottom of the window match the rest of the twoplus11 apps. They sit on the window’s own surface in both light and dark mode, carry a tinted symbol for the kind of message, and a failure now stays on screen long enough to read: six seconds against three and a half for everything else.
The empty download list now reads as a heading. Its title and its one line of guidance were the same shade of gray, so neither looked like the thing to read first.

Fixed

Your license key is no longer readable by other accounts on this Mac. It was written to a file anyone in the staff group could read, and every local macOS account is in that group, so a second user on the same computer could take the business key and use up the seat you paid for. It is readable only by you now, and a file left loose by an earlier version is tightened the next time Grabbr writes it.
A shipped build no longer lets the environment choose which helper Grabbr runs. A developer variable that points Grabbr at a bundle laid out somewhere else was honored in the built app too, and it selects the helper Grabbr copies into your home folder and installs a background job to run. Any process running as you could have left a Python file where it pointed and had Grabbr install it as a background job macOS keeps running after every restart, under Grabbr’s own name. The built app now ignores it.
The background helper for the browser extension now updates along with Grabbr. Grabbr keeps a copy of that helper in a hidden folder in your home folder and points its login item at it. On any Mac that had run an older Grabbr, a new version left that copy alone: the installer picked the copy on disk as the thing to copy from, tried to copy it onto itself, and gave up. So the protection 2.3.0 added against web pages on look-alike addresses such as localhost.attacker.example, and the move of the helper’s logs out of /tmp, only ever reached brand-new installs. Grabbr now compares the helper it ships with the one on disk, replaces it when they differ, and restarts the login item.
Grabbr opens even when one of its own settings or history files is damaged. A preferences file that was not a JSON object, was not readable or was not valid text, or a history file that was not a list, stopped Grabbr before its window appeared, on every launch, with nothing on screen to say why. Those files are now treated as empty and Grabbr starts with defaults. A stray byte in the download archive also made every press of Download Now end in “Unexpected error”; that line is now skipped.
⌘, and ⌘/ now work in the shipped app, and the App menu carries one About Grabbr, not two. The keys were put on the menu once at launch, and macOS rebuilt the menu the first time the window took focus, so the built app showed Settings and Keyboard Shortcuts with no shortcut at all and two About items. The keys are now put back every time the window becomes active.
Switching back to Grabbr with a link on the clipboard fills the link box again. The window’s focus was never reported to the page, so that fill, which respects the Watch clipboard setting, had not run in any version.
A download whose file is deleted while it is still being saved now says so. It used to show the raw error, cut off in the middle of a folder path.
A newer yt-dlp of your own is no longer replaced by the copy inside Grabbr. Grabbr keeps its own downloader in your Library folder and refreshes it from the copy inside the app. It compared the two by file date alone, and the date on the copy inside the app is the date Grabbr was built, not the age of the downloader. So anyone who took Grabbr’s own advice and moved to the nightly channel had that copy put back to an older one on the first launch after an update. Grabbr now asks both copies which version they are and keeps yours whenever it is the newer of the two.
The yt-dlp button in Settings shows the installed version again. Grabbr gave the downloader five seconds to say which version it is, and on this Mac it takes between five and eight, so the button read “Update yt-dlp” with no version beside it and the message after an update said only that it had worked.

Accessibility

Every new window closes with Escape, and focus moves into it when it opens and back where it came from when it closes. The row menu follows the arrow keys the way a Mac menu does, and returns focus to the download it belongs to.
The selected download is announced, with its title and its place in the queue, so the list can be worked entirely by ear.
A message that carries a button is now read out with its button. It used to be hidden from VoiceOver along with the action it was offering.

Site update, August 31, 2026 · Search engines could not see this page’s paid tier

The machine-readable pricing on this page said “free” and stopped there. The structured data Grabbr publishes for search engines and assistants declared only the free personal tier. The Business License sat in a field nothing reads as a price, so a search result or an AI summary could describe Grabbr as free and never mention the $5 Business License for use at work. Both tiers are now declared properly.
Nothing about the price or the app changed. Personal use is still free, with no key and no account, and a Business License is still $5 per computer, one time.

Site update, August 30, 2026 · Buy several apps in one order

One payment, as many apps as you need. The commercial license window on this page could sell exactly one thing: Grabbr. A team that also wanted two other twoplus11 apps paid three separate times, on three separate pages, and filed three separate receipts. That window now carries an Add another app control: search the catalog, set how many computers each app goes on, and pay once. Every app still gets its own license key, and they all arrive in the same email.
Nothing changes if Grabbr is all you want. The window opens exactly as it did, at the same price, with the same count of computers, and an order for a single app takes the route through checkout it always has. The extra controls appear only once the app list has loaded, so a slow or unreachable connection leaves the page as it was.

Formal release notes start with 2.1; earlier builds weren’t tracked.

2.3.0 · August 28, 2026 · Long names, and the helper you can switch off

A video with a very long title now downloads, instead of failing with “Errno 63 file name too long”. Grabbr let yt-dlp name the file however it liked, and every disk limits how long a file’s name can be, so a long enough title meant the download ran, found the video, picked the quality, and then could not be written at all. Grabbr now works out how much room the folder you’re saving into actually has and shortens the name to fit, keeping the video ID on the end so two videos with near-identical titles still land as two files. Names are only ever shortened when they have to be; everyday titles are untouched. The same fix covers a save folder nested so deeply that no file name fits (Grabbr now says so before downloading rather than after) and network drives or USB sticks with a shorter limit than your Mac’s own disk, which Grabbr measures rather than assumes.
Dropping several link lists at once now imports all of them. Dropping three .txt lists imported exactly one, chosen by macOS rather than by you, and the other two disappeared with no message. A list dropped alongside anything else (a screenshot, a folder) was refused outright, even though it was a file Grabbr can read.
A link you send from the browser extension is no longer lost when Grabbr is closed. If the app cannot be reached, the link now waits and is queued the next time Grabbr starts, instead of silently going nowhere.
The Import button is no longer clipped. The row it sits in was drawn slightly too wide, cutting its right edge against the divider, the detail the August 22 screenshot note said was coming.
Nine controls no longer run off the right edge of a small window. Grabbr’s window can be sized down to 840 points wide, and the queue header needed 580 in English and 691 in German and Russian. Because the page cannot scroll sideways, the controls past the edge were not cramped. They were gone, and Open Folder and Reinstall Extension had no other route.
Every control now has a visible edge in light mode. Twelve controls drew their border in white at 40% opacity, measured on the dark theme, where it is fine, and never on the light one, where it is lighter than the surface behind it. The one-character controls (the ↓ in each history row, ≡, ↺, ★, ♥, !) had never been measured at all: the accessibility audit skips text that short and files the result as “incomplete”, which no report reads.
Grabbr no longer walks you through installing a Firefox add-on that does not exist. The + Extension sheet’s Firefox tab listed three install steps (download the add-on from twoplus11.com, confirm when Firefox asks, then press ⌘⇧Y) and a Get the Firefox Add-on button. There has never been a signed add-on to download: Mozilla has to sign one before release Firefox will install it, and that has not happened. This site stopped promising it on August 21; the app kept promising it. The tab now says plainly that there is no Firefox add-on, and points at the two things that do work in Firefox: pasting a video’s address straight in, and Browser cookies, which reads your Firefox profile and always has.
The Firefox tab’s button now goes somewhere useful. It reveals and focuses the Browser cookies switch in Settings instead of opening a download page.
Smooth scrolling now stops when you ask macOS to reduce motion. Two places in the app scrolled with an animation that no stylesheet setting could reach, so System Settings ▸ Accessibility ▸ Display ▸ Reduce Motion had no effect on them. Both now jump straight to where they were going.
Grabbr no longer writes an icon inside its own signed app bundle. Matching the Finder icon to light or dark appearance wrote an icon resource and an extended attribute into the installed app, which invalidates its Developer ID signature on your Mac at first launch, and a broken seal can stop the updater accepting its own updates. The Dock icon still follows appearance; nothing is written to disk to do it.

Changed

Grabbr now requires macOS 14 Sonoma. It has needed it for some time: every library inside the app is built for 14, so on macOS 12 or 13 it did not refuse to open. It crashed on launch, with nothing to explain why. It now declares the requirement, so an older Mac says so plainly instead. If you are on macOS 12 or 13, stay on 2.2.0.
The background helper for the browser extension can be switched off. A new switch in Settings (Background helper for the browser extension) turns off the login item that keeps Grabbr reachable from Chrome and Safari while the app is closed. Turning it off unloads it, removes its login item, and deletes its files. The extensions still work while Grabbr is open.

Security

The name of your Mac is no longer sent when you clear the seat-name box. A business license check sent the computer’s own name whenever Name this computer was left empty, and on a stock Mac that name is built from the owner’s full name at setup. Emptying the field now sends nothing in its place. This went out on activation and on every daily re-check.
A shipped Grabbr now ignores GRABBR_LICENSE_API. That variable exists so a developer can point the app at a local licensing server, and nothing stopped it working in the signed release: any process running as you could set it and the next activation would POST your paid key, machine fingerprint, app version and computer name to a host of its choosing, in cleartext. It now applies only when Grabbr is run from source.
The background helper’s log no longer lands in a shared folder. launchd wrote it to a fixed, world-readable path in /tmp, which any other account on the Mac could read, or aim at a file of yours, since launchd creates the file as you and follows symlinks. It now writes to ~/Library/Logs/Grabbr.

Site update, August 22, 2026 · The whole settings panel, in one screenshot

Website only; no change to the app.

The screenshot on this site now shows every control at once. Grabbr’s settings panel is longer than a laptop screen lets the window be, so the old screenshot ran out of room part of the way down: the Smart Trim switches were cut off mid-list, and the save folder was never in the picture at all. The new one runs end to end: the link box, format, quality, all of the options, every Smart Trim switch and what to do with the segments it finds, and where your files are saved.
It is a real screenshot, not a drawing of one. Two captures of the same window, taken at the top and at the bottom of the panel and joined where they overlap, next to a queue of eleven downloads that actually ran. The music is the site owner’s own.
One detail in it runs ahead of 2.2.0. The Import button sits fully inside the panel in the screenshot; in the version you have, the row it is in is drawn slightly too wide and clips Import’s right edge against the divider. The fix is done and will be in the next version. Import works either way, it is only cut off to look at.

2.2.0 · August 20, 2026 · Every playlist entry judged on its own, and Safari

Fixed: a playlist video that failed was reported as downloaded. Grabbr fetches a whole playlist in one go and carries on past anything it can’t get: a video made private, pulled in your country, or taken down. Every entry before the last one was then marked finished regardless: a green check, a full progress bar, and a row in your download history for a file that was never saved. The last entry had the opposite problem, and was marked failed whenever anything earlier in the playlist had failed, even though it downloaded perfectly. Each video is now judged on what actually happened to it, the ones that failed say why, and only the ones that really arrived reach your history.
Fixed: a part-finished playlist says how much you got. It used to show the raw reason the last failed video gave: “This video is unavailable” on a playlist where eighteen of twenty downloaded fine, which reads as though the whole thing failed. It now says how many of how many didn’t come through.
New: the browser extension works in Safari, not just Chrome. Same popup, same Video/MP3 choice, same ⌘⇧Y. Each browser installs it differently, so Grabbr’s setup window now asks which browser you use and shows only the steps that apply, instead of assuming Chrome. (A Firefox add-on was announced here in error: it is built, but Mozilla has to sign it before Firefox will install one, and that has not happened yet.)
New: an Import button for a list of links. Dropping a .txt of URLs onto the window queued them all, but a drag is not something you can do from the keyboard, so that was the only way in. There is now an Import button beside Paste that opens a file picker and queues the same list.
New: subtitles can go inside the video instead of beside it. Turn on “Put subtitles inside the video” and the tracks are written into the MP4 itself, so they travel with the file and switch on in any player. The separate .srt files are still saved as well.
New: Smart Trim can mark segments instead of cutting them. Choose “Cut them out”, which is what Grabbr has always done and stays the default, or “Mark as chapters”, which leaves the video whole and writes each segment in as a named chapter your player can jump over.
New: downloads can go through a proxy. If the site you are downloading from is blocked on your network (a school, an office, a hotel), point Grabbr at an HTTP, HTTPS or SOCKS proxy in Settings and it routes through it.
New: the download history sorts by any column. Title, Site, Date and Size are each a heading you can click to order by, and clicking again reverses it. Grabbr remembers the order you chose, and the search box still narrows the list.
Fixed: “Episode 10” sorted before “Episode 2” in the history, because titles were compared without ever looking at the numbers inside them. Numbers now order as numbers, and both columns follow the in-app language picker rather than whatever macOS is set to.
Fixed: searching the history couldn’t find an accented title. Typing cafe did not match Café, muller did not match Müller. Both the query and the row are now folded for the match, while every row still shows the title exactly as it was saved.
Fixed: a failure raised while a dialog was open reported to nobody. The toast (the only place a failed download or a refused clipboard read is ever shown) sat below the license gate and the confirm dialog. It now sits above every scrim in the window.
Fixed: the switches in Settings saved what you set. Clicking a switch directly (rather than the row it sits on) flipped it on screen but saved nothing, and screen readers went on reporting the old state. There is one path now, and both spots do the same thing.
Fixed: a setting Grabbr could not use now says so. A speed limit typed as “5mb” rather than “5M” was silently dropped while every download ran at full speed. A value Grabbr cannot read is now marked as such, in the field and in a message, and the same is true of the proxy address.
Fixed: the site badges are readable. The small YouTube, Vimeo and Spotify badges drew white text on each site’s own color, between 2.3:1 and 4.3:1 on nine of the fourteen, under the 4.5:1 the accessibility guidelines ask for. Each badge now picks whichever of white or black is legible on its color, and takes its name from the site rather than the slug, so X is no longer called “Twitter”.
Fixed: less motion really does mean less motion. Grabbr turned off two specific animations for people who ask their Mac to reduce motion, and left everything else running at full length. Now everything is.
Fixed: clearing the download history now says what survives it: your downloaded files stay where they are; only the records go.
Fixed: the window can no longer lock up when it regains focus. Bringing Grabbr back to the front could, on the wrong thread, wait forever for something that could never happen. Every message Grabbr sends to its own interface now takes a route where that cannot occur.
Fixed: three buttons that spoke English in all 13 languages (the Download button’s screen-reader name, the update sheet’s opening line and the yt-dlp button) and the German history column headed “Seite” (a page) rather than “Website”.
Fixed: the Download button in the mobile menu on this site was hard to read when pressed: its label stayed dark while the button darkened underneath it, at 2.35:1. It now behaves like the other download buttons, which were already correct.
The company name on an activated business license was always blank. Grabbr read it from a field the licensing server stopped sending. The name is there, and it now appears. Nothing about how licenses work changed; only what the window could see.

Site update, August 19, 2026 · A checksum for the download

Website only; no change to the app.

The download page now publishes the SHA-256 of the Grabbr.dmg it serves, so you can confirm the file you got is the file we put there. macOS already runs the check that matters (Grabbr is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, and a copy altered after we signed it will not open), but there was no way to check a download by hand, which is what anyone installing it on more than their own Mac tends to want. The checksum is on the download section under SHA-256 checksum, next to the one command that compares it with your copy. It is published as a plain file too, at Grabbr.dmg.sha256, in the format shasum -c reads.

Site update, August 17, 2026 · The other apps, after the sign-up

Website only; no change to the app.

The list of the other twoplus11 Mac apps has moved to the bottom of the page, below the email sign-up rather than above it. It used to arrive while the page was still making its case for Grabbr, so the last thing you read before being asked for your email was a wall of other apps. It sits at the end now: the page finishes on Grabbr, and the list is there if you want to see what else there is.

Site update, August 12, 2026 · New screenshot and demo

The screenshot and the demo video were both re-recorded. The old ones were captured before Grabbr took its own color, so they showed the app in plain macOS blue. The new ones show it as it is now, in gold.
Both are real recordings of real downloads: four tracks, start to finish, with the times and file sizes the app actually reported. The music is the site owner’s own.
The screenshot is sharper than the one it replaces, and the demo is larger, so both hold up when you click to zoom.
No change to the app.

Download update, August 12, 2026 · Opens without an internet check

The copy of Grabbr in the download now opens without needing the internet. macOS checks that an app has been approved by Apple before it runs for the first time. That approval can travel inside the app itself, and in the download it did not, so the first launch had to reach Apple to confirm it. Offline, behind a hotel or campus login page, or when Apple’s service was slow, that check could fail and macOS would report that Grabbr “cannot be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software.” The approval now travels with the app, so the first launch works with no connection at all.
Automatic updates were never affected: the copy they install already carried its approval.
The app itself is unchanged: same version, same signature. Only the download was repackaged, so there is nothing to do if you already have Grabbr installed.

Site update, August 12, 2026 · How updating really works

The update instructions were out of date. They described downloading a new copy and dragging it over the old one. Grabbr updates itself: it checks about once a week and offers to install the new version in place, refusing any download that isn't signed by us. You can still replace it by hand, and you can turn the automatic check off.
Nothing else changed. What this page already said about your files (that they are never uploaded, and that there is no account and no telemetry) was accurate and is unchanged.
No change to the app.

Site update, August 12, 2026 · Readable buttons and small print

The buttons in the header say what they say. The Tip and Download pills were drawing their label at 55% opacity over a colored fill, which measured as low as 1.6:1 against it, well under the 4.5:1 the accessibility guidelines ask for. Their labels are now solid, and the fill behind them is set a shade deeper so the text genuinely clears that bar.
The Subscribe and Support buttons too. Their labels were colored for one end of a two-color gradient and disappeared into the other end. Both now use a single fill that the label is legible on all the way across.
The newsletter note, the “More apps” caption and the version line under the download button were all set too faint to read comfortably; each is now above the AA threshold.
Keyboard shortcut chips are legible against their own background.
The screenshot viewer no longer makes every visit quietly re-download this page as if it were an image, a wasted request on each load.
No change to the app.

Site update, August 12, 2026 · The twoplus11 logo, back to its own color

The twoplus11 wordmark in the top-left corner is the studio’s blue again. It had been recolored to match Grabbr’s accent color, which made the same logo look like a different one on every app’s site. It now matches twoplus11.com and the rest of the apps.
No change to the app.

Site update, August 11, 2026 · Clearer search results

The description under this site in Google is no longer cut off. It ran past the length Google shows and broke mid-word; it now reads as a complete sentence.
Sharing a link to the privacy, terms or changelog page now shows a proper preview card instead of a bare URL.
The sitemap now reports when each page actually changed, so search engines re-check pages that have been updated instead of assuming they are stale.
No change to the app.

August 11, 2026 · A new look

Changed: Grabbr has a new app icon. Every twoplus11 app moved to one generated palette, so the color in your Dock, on this site and on the download page is now the same color. They had drifted apart.
Changed: refreshed the site to match, including the tab icon and the link preview image.
Changed: the GifMint link at the bottom of this page was showing the wrong icon. It now shows GifMint's own mark.

2.1.22 · August 9, 2026 · Pick your cookie browser

New: choose which browser Grabbr reads cookies from. Automatic picking used the first supported browser installed, which meant Grabbr could read cookies from a Chrome you had never signed into and ignore the browser you actually use. Settings now lets you name it.
New: Grabbr updates itself. When a new version is out you get a prompt with the release notes and can install it in place: no more visiting the site and dragging a new copy over the old one. This is the last update you have to install by hand.
New: refreshed appearance. Grabbr now uses the shared twoplus11 palette and a regenerated app icon, so it matches the rest of the family.
Fixed: contrast and keyboard-navigation problems (WCAG 2.1 AA). Faint text is now readable, and every control can be reached and used from the keyboard.
Fixed: the Check for Updates button spins while it checks, instead of flashing an empty window.

2.1.21 · July 24, 2026 · Browser-cookie fix

Fixed: downloads no longer fail with an “Operation not permitted” cookie error. Grabbr now recognizes Vivaldi, Opera, and Chromium (alongside Chrome, Brave, Edge, and Firefox) for cookie import, and only falls back to Safari (whose cookies macOS keeps locked down) as a last resort.
Fixed: browser cookies are now only used when you turn on “Browser cookies” in Settings. Previously they were read on every download, so a cookie-permission problem could break downloads even if you never asked for cookies.
Improved: when browser cookies can’t be read, the error now explains how to fix it (grant Full Disk Access, or turn off Browser cookies) instead of showing a raw system error.

2.1.20 · July 17, 2026 · 13 languages

New: 13-language localization with an in-app flag picker (auto-detects your Mac's language, override anytime).
Fixed: a leftover single-video clip range no longer silently applies to every video in a bulk playlist download.
Fixed: an incomplete clip range (e.g. a blank End field) no longer silently downloads the full untrimmed video. It's now caught with a warning.

2.1.19 · July 16, 2026 · Appearance override fix

Fixed: pinning the appearance to Light or Dark (instead of following the system) now restyles the whole window. Previously the title bar kept the system's appearance when the override and the system disagreed.

2.1.18 · July 15, 2026 · “Tip”

Renamed the “Donate” link to “Tip.”

2.1.17 · July 15, 2026

Refined the dark-mode Dock icon: now a true near-black, monochrome-style background with just a hint of blue, instead of a deeper tint of the same color.

2.1.16 · July 15, 2026

Fixed: the app icon could show the wrong light/dark variant in Finder, Spotlight, Launchpad, and the Dock while Grabbr wasn't running. It now updates everywhere immediately, not just the Dock tile of an already-open app.

2.1.15 · July 14, 2026

New: the Dock icon now follows your Mac's light/dark appearance automatically, or pin it to Light or Dark from the new appearance toggle.
Fixed: the Dock icon rendered edge-to-edge with no padding, making it look larger than every other app in the Dock. It now follows Apple's standard icon grid, sized and spaced to match.

2.1.14 · July 13, 2026

twoplus11 wordmark credit in the footer and update panel.
Occasional, low-pressure prompt to support twoplus11 after extended use, never more than once, easy to dismiss for good.

2.1.13 · July 12, 2026

New: Help and Review buttons in the footer, so you can get support or leave feedback in one click.
Improved: the Check for Updates button is now a compact icon that badges when an update is available, instead of a text button.
Improved: the site's demo now plays as a real recording (mp4) in the full-screen lightbox instead of a static GIF.

2.1.12 · July 11, 2026

New: Download several at once: Grabbr can run up to 3 downloads in parallel (set it in Settings; leave it at 1 for the old one-at-a-time behavior).
New: Your queue survives a restart: quit with items still waiting and Grabbr offers to pick up where you left off next time.
New: a Business license button in the header: one click to upgrade to, or manage, a business license.
New: Automatic update checks: the app quietly checks about once a week and badges the update button when a newer version is available (never a pop-up; nothing is downloaded or installed automatically). Turn it off with Automatically check for updates in the update panel.
Hardening: the bundled yt-dlp / ffmpeg / deno tools are checksum-verified before every signed build, and opening links is locked to a safe allow-list.

2.1.11 · July 10, 2026

Fixed: YouTube downloads that failed with "Requested format is not available" now work on any Mac. Grabbr bundles a JavaScript runtime so YouTube's extraction step is solved locally, no Homebrew, no setup. (Previously this failed on Macs without a JS runtime installed.)
Licensing is steadier: a server outage or a transient error no longer risks locking you out (the offline grace period applies instead), and if you fix a license issue (free a seat, renew) the app rechecks right away rather than possibly waiting up to a day.

2.1.10 · July 9, 2026

Personal use now says so plainly: the licensing screen spells out that Grabbr is free for personal use and includes free updates forever, no catch, no expiry

2.1.9 · July 2026

The app header now credits yt-dlp (the open-source engine behind every download) right under the Grabbr name

2.1.8 · July 2026

New: Grabbr now clearly credits the open-source projects it’s built on: a first-launch acknowledgement for yt-dlp and SponsorBlock with links to support them, plus a Credits button in the footer to reopen it anytime
The Smart Trim section now names SponsorBlock as the source of its community segment data

2.1.7 · June 2026

Fixed: the Reinstall Ext button now correctly locates the bundled extension files on all Macs (including Intel); previously it could fail with “could not locate extension files”

2.1.6 · June 2026

New: Reinstall Ext button in the app footer: re-copies the browser extension files to ~/GrabbrBrowserExtension and opens the folder in Finder, so you can reload it in Chrome without reinstalling the whole app

2.1.5 · June 2026

New: Check for Updates: a footer button that checks whether you’re running the latest Grabbr and links you to the download page when an update is available
New: completed downloads now have Open File and Reveal in Finder buttons, and double-clicking a finished item opens it
New: drop a list of links (or a .txt file of links) onto Grabbr to queue them all at once; pasting or entering several links does the same
New: bump a waiting download to the top of the queue, and reveal any past download from the history list in Finder
New: when a download fails because the downloader is out of date, the card offers a one-click Update yt-dlp & retry
Completed downloads now show how many ad/sponsor segments Smart Trim removed (e.g. “3 ads cut”), and the menu-bar menu shows live download status
Fixed: reopening the license window could duplicate every item in the list; the V / A / ? shortcuts no longer fire while a dialog is open; the license window showed a leftover “V” logo instead of the Grabbr icon

2.1.4 · June 2026

Security: the local bridge now ignores requests from ordinary web pages: only the Grabbr extension and local apps can queue a download
Security: thumbnail fetching refuses local/private network addresses, and video titles and URLs are fully escaped before display
Accessibility: the Subtitles switch is correctly skipped (not just dimmed) when it doesn’t apply, and announces its state
Fixed: the “ads removed” count always showed 0. SponsorBlock segments are now counted correctly
Fixed: cancelling a download now also stops the bundled video-merge step, and a rare race could leave one of two simultaneous downloads stuck
Fixed: a background-fallback audio request now correctly produces an MP3 (was always video), and a mistyped speed limit no longer breaks every download
Clearer failure messages for folder-permission problems and failed downloads

2.1.3 · June 2026

Fixed: YouTube audio (MP3) downloads failing with “Requested quality not available”
Higher-quality video: removed an outdated YouTube client that capped downloads at 240p

2.1.2 · June 2026

Now called Grabbr
Fixed: downloads could fail to start on some Macs (a code-signing issue in the bundled downloader)
Progress bar now uses the app’s blue instead of the source site’s color: an in-progress YouTube download no longer looks like an error

2.1 · June 2026

Download video and audio from YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo, Twitch and 1,800+ other sites
Smart Trim automatically removes sponsor and ad segments
Quality badges and the final file size shown on completion
One-click Copy URL and keyboard shortcuts
MP3 audio extraction, subtitle extraction, and batch playlist downloads
Companion Chrome extension (press ⌘⇧Y to send the current page to Grabbr)
Runs entirely on your Mac, no account, no trial timers