Aether Browser 🌌

What's new — v1.6.0 Beast Search

• Five sources, one page — Aether Search now runs DuckDuckGo, DDG Lite, Bing, Wikipedia's API and Mojeek (an independent crawler) in parallel, with per-source filter chips and a diversity pass so no two consecutive results share a domain.
• Bangs — type !yt lofi beats, !g, !w, !gh, !fk and jump straight to that site's own search. 43 bangs ship in the binary; unknown ones fall through to a normal search.
• Instant answers v2 — on-device calculator, unit conversion (10 km to miles, 72 f to c, 500 ms to s), percentages (15% of 80) and a world clock (time in tokyo, time in delhi) — previewing live as you type.
• Knowledge panel & related — Wikipedia panels with thumbnails above results, related-search chips below them.
• Keyboard-first — ↑/↓ walk the results, Enter opens, 1-9 quick-open, / jumps to the box, Esc clears; live suggestion dropdown while typing.
• Window controls fixed — the — □ × cluster now hugs the window's right edge; drag regions can never eat a click aimed at a cross button.

Install & first run

Prerequisites: Node.js 20+ and Ollama.

# 1. Install Ollama, then pull a model (any one works — see Models):
ollama pull qwen3.5:9b        # great tool calling, ~6 GB
#   smaller machine?  ollama pull qwen3.5:4b   (~2.5 GB)

# 2. Clone & run Aether
git clone https://github.com/e2sy/aether-browser.git
cd aether-browser
npm install
npm run dev

Installers

npm run dist        # NSIS (Windows) / dmg (macOS) / AppImage + deb (Linux)

Models — use any Ollama model, including 4B

The Models tab in the AI sidebar is a full model manager:

• Curated catalog — one-click cards with disk size and RAM hints (Qwen 3.5 9B/4B/1.7B, Llama 3.1/3.2, Gemma 3, Phi, Hermes 3, Mistral, DeepSeek-R1, coder and vision models, TinyLlama).
• Any tag — type any exact Ollama tag: qwen3.5:4b, llama3.1:8b, deepseek-r1:8b, or a GGUF from the Hugging Face registry (hf.co/user/model-GGUF).
• Live progress — pulls stream progress bars with percent and status. Pulls continue in the background even if you close the sidebar, and restore their state when you reopen.
• Cancel / delete / switch — stop a download mid-flight, free disk space, or make any installed model the active brain with one click. The first pulled model becomes the default automatically.

AI features

The web automation agent

Open the Agent tab, type a task, press Run. The agent renders the page as a numbered menu of interactive elements and picks one tool per step (max 12 steps):

• Stable refs + DOM diffing — elements keep their numbers while you interact, and after each action the model only receives what changed.
• Confirm gate — every mutating action waits for your Allow / Deny (toggle in Settings → “Agent asks before every action”).
• Guardrails — the agent refuses passwords and payment fields and stops at login walls or captchas.

Macros — replay without a model

Tick ⏺ Record as macro before an agent run. Successful actions are saved as a replayable script; replay re-finds elements by captured CSS locators, needs no model at all, and still respects the confirm gate.

Editing macros

Open the Macros list (Agent tab → Macros) and press ✎ to open the step editor. You can rename the macro, reorder steps (↑/↓), edit any argument, add new steps (navigate, click, type, press_key, scroll, go_back), or remove steps — then Save.

Typical use: record “search for X on a site” once, then edit the type step's text and replay it any time — deterministic and instant.

Sharing macros (import / export)

• Export — the ⤒ button on a macro row writes it to a .macro.json file you can back up or share.
• Import — the ⤓ button next to the Macros count opens a shared file; steps are re-validated on the way in (non-replayable steps are dropped with a warning) and duplicate names get a “ (2)” suffix.

Chrome extensions

Aether supports unpacked MV2/MV3 Chrome extensions via electron-chrome-extensions: content scripts, background pages, browser-action buttons with popups, and chrome.contextMenus items.

One-click install from a .crx / .zip package

• File dialog — Settings → Extensions → Install from .crx / .zip…
• Drag & drop — drop a .crx or .zip onto the drop zone on the same page.
• “Open with Aether” — on Windows, Aether registers as a viewer for .crx files: double-click one in Explorer (or pick Aether in “Open with”) and it installs, no unzipping needed. On macOS the same works via “Open with → Aether”.

CRX2 and CRX3 containers are both parsed (the zip payload is extracted and installed as a normal unpacked extension under your user-data folder). Signatures are not verified — only install packages you trust.

Unpacked folders

1. Get an unpacked extension (a folder containing manifest.json).
2. Open Settings (Ctrl+,) → Extensions → Load unpacked…
3. Its action button appears in the toolbar; right-click it for extension menus, click for popups or the extension's action handler.

• Disable / enable — the ⏸ / ▶ buttons in the extensions list. Disabled extensions are remembered but not loaded.
• Remove — the ✕ button (files on disk stay untouched).

Browser basics

Tabs & windows

• Context menu (right-click a tab): reload, duplicate, pin, mute, hibernate, discard, move to new window, close, close others, close to the right.
• Pin — pinned tabs shrink to their favicon and sort first.
• Mute — 🔇 per tab; a ♪ indicator shows tabs playing audio.
• Multi-window — Ctrl+N opens a new window; “Move to new window” in the tab menu (or File menu) detaches a tab into its own window. Closing a window's last tab closes that window; closing every window quits Aether.

Tiered memory saver

Settings → Hibernate idle tabs after (off / 15 / 30 / 60 minutes). Background tabs first hibernate 🌙 — muted and throttled to 1 fps, they wake instantly with no reload. After 3× that delay they are fully discarded (unloaded, shown as (unloaded), reloaded on click). Pinned and audio-playing tabs are never touched.

Per-site zoom

Ctrl+= / Ctrl+- / Ctrl+0 (or the View menu). Each site's zoom is remembered and re-applied on every visit; a Chrome-style bubble shows the level and resets on click.

Downloads

Files land in your Downloads folder (duplicates get “ (1)” suffixes). A shelf at the bottom-left shows progress with cancel and “show in folder”. Ctrl+J opens the full aether://downloads manager — search, pause/resume, re-download, reveal.

Aether Search — bangs & instant answers

The search page (aether://search) is Aether's own metasearch: five sources in parallel, source badges + filter chips, a Wikipedia knowledge panel, related searches and full keyboard control (↓/↑, Enter, 1-9, /). Start a query with a bang to jump straight to a site: !yt YouTube, !g Google, !w Wikipedia, !gh GitHub, !so Stack Overflow, !fk Flipkart, !sp Spotify, !maps Maps, and more. Instant answers computed on this device: math (2^10), units (10 km to miles, 72 f to c, 1 gb to mb, 500 ms to s), percentages (15% of 80), and the world clock (time in tokyo, time in delhi, time, date).

Privacy & security

• All AI runs on localhost:11434 by default; nothing leaves your machine unless you enable the optional cloud fallback.
• Renderers are sandboxed with context isolation and zero Node access. Web pages cannot call browser IPC — sensitive channels verify the sender.
• Ad & tracker blocking — EasyList + EasyPrivacy, cached on disk, toggleable.
• Site permissions — camera / mic / location / notifications prompt per site with an optional “remember”; manage every grant in Settings.
• Chrome-like identity — the Electron/ UA token is stripped so Google and YouTube treat Aether like a normal Chrome browser (toggleable).
• All data (history, bookmarks, page memory, permissions, settings) lives in your user data folder as plain JSON files you can inspect and delete.

Keyboard shortcuts

macOS: use ⌘ instead of Ctrl.

Troubleshooting