The three gaps nobody closes

Most people are not looking for a different browser; they are looking for the one they already know with three specific things fixed. The first is that a plain build does not block anything: advertising, trackers and the various scripts that watch what you read are all allowed through, and the standard answer is to install extensions until the toolbar is full. The second is that the privacy controls exist but are buried several menus deep, and they operate globally — a single switch for everything, rather than a policy per site. The third is that there is no portable build at all, so the browser and its data are tied to one machine.

This project is an attempt to close all three without touching the engine. Nothing about how pages are rendered changes, nothing about web compatibility changes; what changes is what the browser does by itself before any page loads.

Filtering that is on before you ask

The blocking is built in rather than added. Pop-up advertising, tracking scripts and the redirect chains that sit behind a lot of low-quality pages are filtered at the browser level, before the page has finished assembling itself — which is also why pages feel faster: less is being fetched, and less is being executed. Nothing has to be installed first, and nothing has to be re-authorised after an update.

The privacy side is more granular than the plain build, and this is the part that matters in practice. Protection of browsing traces and fingerprint resistance are exposed as adjustable options rather than a single toggle, and the policy can be set per site — strict where it counts, looser where a site breaks if it is treated strictly. That is a more honest design than one switch labelled private, because the sites people actually need are rarely the ones that behave well.

Gestures and drag, which are a habit

Two features here are the kind that sound trivial in a specification and become impossible to give up in use. Mouse gestures are drawn with the right button held: a shape to close the current tab, a straight line upward to return to the top of a page, and the mapping is editable, so the set can be whatever the hand already expects. Drag actions work on the same principle — select text and throw it to search, grab a link and throw it into a new tab — and both replace a right-click menu with a movement.

The small details go the same way: double-click a tab to close it, close with the right button, and the reflexes built up in other browsers of this lineage survive the move. That sounds like a minor point and is actually the whole adoption question: a browser that forces you to relearn where your hands go will be uninstalled within a week, however good its filtering is.

The extension catalogue, and a portable build

Because the engine is Chromium, the extension catalogue is not a subset of the usual one — it is the usual one. Whatever was installed before installs again here, including the content blockers and password managers people accumulate over years, and the settings and profiles behind them carry over as well. For anyone who has spent time assembling a working set of extensions, this is the difference between trying a browser and moving to one.

The portable build is official rather than a community hack. Unpacked, it runs without writing to the registry and without creating a system service; bookmarks, saved passwords, extensions and settings all live in the program's own directory. On a removable drive it carries the whole browsing environment between machines, and on a computer where installing software needs an administrator it is simply a folder. The trade is stated plainly by the project: a portable build cannot update itself, so a new version means replacing the program directory by hand.

What to know before moving in

Two things, and both are worth saying before rather than after. The main program is not open source; the project publishes a handful of its components — the filtering, the tab container, the sync chain among them — under an open licence, which means parts of the work can be read and audited but not all of it. For a browser that asks to be trusted with everything you read, that is a real limitation, and the honest framing is that it is smaller than a fully closed product and larger than a fully open one.

The second is continuity. The project has been maintained by one developer since 2020, on a genuinely brisk release rhythm, and the engine has been kept close to the current upstream version rather than drifting. That record is reassuring and it is also the exact shape of the risk: one person's attention is the whole bus factor, and a browser is a thing you keep using for years. Both facts belong in the decision rather than only in the footnotes.

Who it suits

People who like the engine they already use and dislike what it does not do. People who want advertising and tracking gone without maintaining a stack of extensions and re-checking them after every update. People who have habits — gestures, drag actions, double-click to close — that other browsers of this lineage trained into them. And people who need a browser on a machine they do not administer, for whom the portable build is not a bonus feature but the reason to look at all.

Nothing is reinvented here. It is the same engine with the advertising removed, privacy controls brought forward and made adjustable, gestures and drag actions built in, and a portable build offered officially instead of left to whoever felt like packaging one. If the complaint about mainstream browsers is that they work well but arrive undressed, this is a reasonable answer to that complaint.

The honest summary

The value is in assembly rather than invention: a well-known engine, a filtering layer that is on by default, privacy controls that can be tuned per site, a set of ergonomic habits preserved from the browsers this audience grew up with, and a portable build that is supported rather than improvised. The costs are equally concrete — a main program that cannot be fully audited, no self-updating in the portable build, and a bus factor of one. For someone who wants a browser that behaves well out of the box and never needs to be reconstructed from extensions, the trade is easy; for someone who needs every line of a browser to be inspectable, it is not the right one, and it does not pretend to be.