MenubarX on a Mac: what it puts in the menu bar

MenubarX is a web browser that hangs off a menu bar icon. Click the icon and a small browser window drops down under it. Pin a site to it and that site gets its own icon, permanently, at the top of the screen.

That last part is the detail that decides whether the app fits a given Mac. Most utilities in this area take one slot. MenubarX takes as many as the number of sites pinned to it, which makes it useful on a sparse menu bar and complicated on a full one.

What the app is

The core idea is simple. Rather than opening a browser tab for a site that needs to be glanced at constantly, the site lives behind an icon and opens in a small window when clicked. Chat tools, dashboards, music web players, translation pages and documentation all fit that pattern.

The app is published by 6X Studio LLC and is listed on the Mac App Store as MenubarX, a floating browser, in the Utilities category. The listing is 5.5 MB, requires macOS 14 or later, is rated 16+ for unrestricted web access, ships in English plus 15 other languages, and supports Family Sharing. The developer's own site also distributes a direct download, with version 1.7.6 dated April 2025 as the current build listed there.

Because it renders web pages, it supports web apps and progressive web apps generally rather than a fixed list of services. There is also a device simulator that presents pages as an iPhone, iPad, Mac or Kindle, along with a user agent switcher, which is how sites that behave differently on mobile can be coaxed into a narrow window.

What it costs

There are two purchase routes and they are not the same price.

Route	Price	Notes
Mac App Store	Free download, MenubarX Pro at 6.99 US dollars	In-app purchase, supports Family Sharing
Developer's site	4.99 US dollars	Described as a lifetime Pro license, sold through Paddle and FastSpring
Chinese resellers	29 yuan	Listed on the developer's buy page through two storefronts

The buy page lists what Pro unlocks: unlimited tabs, unlimited bookmarks, a custom home page, a custom website icon, and a golden default icon. The app's FAQ adds one more, a custom shortcut assigned to an individual window.

The free version is therefore functional rather than crippled. It runs, it browses, it pins. What it limits is how many tabs and bookmarks can be kept and how far the icons can be customised. For a single pinned site, the free version is the whole product.

What it actually puts in the menu bar

This is where MenubarX differs structurally from most menu bar utilities.

A password manager adds one icon. A backup agent adds one icon. MenubarX adds one icon for the app, and then an icon for each site that gets pinned. Custom website icons and a colourful icon style exist precisely so those icons can be told apart, which is an acknowledgement that there will be several of them.

The width arithmetic follows from that. Four pinned sites is four slots, and the menu bar draws from the right edge with a finite amount of room. On a MacBook with a notch, the notch removes the middle of the bar, and items that reach it are not drawn. App menus on the left take priority over status items, so opening an app with a long menu list pushes status icons off the visible area.

macOS does not report any of this. It stops drawing items and says nothing. An icon that was working yesterday is simply gone today, with no overflow indicator and no list of what was dropped.

Working it from the keyboard

The app leans on shortcuts, which is the right design for something meant to be opened and dismissed constantly.

The global toggle is Option + X, and it works whether or not MenubarX is the active app. Inside a window, Command + N opens a tab, Command + Shift + W closes the window, Command + Shift + P pins the window so it stays on top, Command + Shift + D detaches it into a normal window, Command + Shift + B shows or hides the address bar, Command + L focuses the location bar, Command + R refreshes and Command + Shift + R refreshes with the cache cleared. Command plus a digit from 1 to 9 jumps to that tab. Command + Shift + O opens the current page in the default browser.

Two version notes are worth knowing before assuming a shortcut is broken. The 1.7.2 release, dated October 2024, changed the toggle behaviour on macOS 15.0 to use the Control key rather than the Option key because of a system change. The 1.7.4 release in December 2024 removed a shortcut limit on macOS 15.2.

There is also a URL scheme, which opens a given address at a given size directly. That makes the app addressable from a script, a launcher or an automation, which in turn means a pinned site does not strictly need a visible icon to be reachable.

Setting up a pinned site so it is usable

A site dropped into a narrow window straight from its desktop address is often unusable, and most of the first-run frustration with this category comes from skipping the setup step.

The window itself is resizable, and the app has a responsive resize mode so the page reflows rather than showing a horizontal scrollbar. For sites that only lay out well on a phone, the device simulator presents the window as an iPhone, iPad, Mac or Kindle, and the user agent can be switched independently, including a custom string and a configurable default. That combination is what makes a site designed for a 1,400 pixel browser window fit in a 375 pixel dropdown.

Several controls live behind a right click rather than in a settings screen. Right clicking the menu bar icon opens the bookmarks manager, right clicking the home glyph changes the home page, right clicking the clock glyph changes the auto refresh interval, and right clicking the phone glyph switches the user agent. Holding Command while clicking opens a new tab. Element inspection is available by right clicking a page once the option is enabled in preferences.

Quick search works from the location bar directly, with the search engine set in the home page section of preferences. There is a setting to disable the red badge that some sites put on the icon, which matters if the point of pinning a site was to stop being interrupted by it. Boss keys hide everything at once.

One behaviour is worth planning around. The app can destroy a page automatically to release resources, which is good for memory and bad for a page holding an unsaved form. Pinning the window with Command + Shift + P keeps it on top and is also the documented step for keeping a session alive through other software.

Where it collides with a crowded menu bar

The most useful thing about MenubarX for this discussion is that its own documentation addresses the problem directly.

The first entry in the app's FAQ is how to hide excess menu bar icons. It gives two routes: the Menu Bar section of macOS System Settings, and MenubarX Settings, then Features, then Compatibility. The twelfth entry is titled work with Bartender or Hidden Bar, and the instruction is to move MenubarX and the New menu bar items appear here marker into the Show menu bar items group so the icons display properly.

The version history reinforces it. Release 1.6.2, from June 2023, added a compatibility mode for third party icon management applications. Release 1.7.5, from February 2025, added a guide banner for situations where the menu bar is blocked by the notch.

Read together, that is an app which adds icons shipping first-party instructions for the apps that hide them. It is not a contradiction. It is what happens when a tool designed to multiply menu bar items meets a bar with a fixed width, and the sensible response is to run both kinds of tool rather than choose between them. A menu bar organizer collapses the icons that are not being read into a group, so the pinned sites that are being read keep their slots.

What it does and does not solve

Worth being precise about the boundaries, since the app gets recommended for problems it does not address.

It does put a web page one click away without a browser window. The feature list covers auto refresh, an ad blocker, custom JavaScript and CSS injection, background audio, picture in picture for video, a download manager, web notifications, local file preview, iCloud sync of bookmarks, a custom network proxy over HTTP or SOCKS5 added in 1.7.6, and an option to destroy a page automatically to release resources.

It does not organise the menu bar. Icons still sit wherever macOS draws them, and nothing is hidden by default.

It does not give a menu bar icon to a native app that lacks one. The icons it creates belong to web pages, not to installed applications.

It does not create width. Every pinned site is a slot that something else no longer has, which is the reason the two categories of tool end up installed together.

It does not replace a browser for anything longer than a glance. The detach shortcut exists because the dropdown window is the wrong shape for sustained work, and the open in browser shortcut exists because some pages need the real thing. Both are acknowledgements built into the app rather than gaps in it.

It is also not a background service. Pages only run while windows exist, and the automatic page destruction setting is there to keep idle sites from holding memory. Anything that needs to keep running and notify reliably is better served by a native app or a browser tab that stays open.

Deciding whether it earns a slot

Three questions settle it in most cases.

How many sites would actually be pinned? One or two is cheap and the free version covers it. Six turns the menu bar into a second browser tab strip, and at that point the slots have to come from somewhere.

Is the site checked or used? A page glanced at for a number benefits from being one click away. A page worked in for twenty minutes is better off in a real browser window, and the detach shortcut exists for exactly that transition.

Is the menu bar already full? If the date beside the clock has started disappearing, or icons come and go depending on which app is in front, the bar is already over capacity and adding pinned sites will make something else vanish silently. The comparison page covers what collapsing versus deleting actually changes.

What to change first

Before pinning anything, count what is already in the menu bar and set every system item that offers the choice to Show When Active. If the count is still high, collapse the icons that are never clicked with Koffret first, then pin sites into the space that frees up.