Unweb Launches as a Free Browser Where Every Visit Is a First Visit

Unweb is out, at version 0.3, for Windows, macOS and Linux. It’s a small browser that opens strangers. A stranger has no history, no logins and no cookies, and when you close it, everything it picked up is deleted from your computer.

The idea came from a simple annoyance. Your everyday browser is soaked in you, so you never see a site the way a newcomer does. Private windows help a little, but they share one session with each other and are awkward to run in parallel. You can’t easily put three fresh visitors next to each other and watch what each one gets.

That is what Unweb does. Open a site, click Side by side twice, and three strangers show it at once, each with a store of its own. Type an address in the bar and all of them go there.

Three strangers on a made-up shop page served on the same machine. Each one is a first visit, so each gets the new visitor offer.

What’s in 0.3

Each stranger has a thin strip above it with a cookie count, such as “5 cookies from example.com”, so you can see what a site hands a newcomer the moment it arrives. On Windows a stranger can have a language of its own.

A stranger can also have a location: a proxy you give it. Everything that stranger loads goes through the proxy, and the names it looks up are resolved there too. Put four strangers through proxies in four countries and you see four versions of the same page. Save that window as a setup and it’s one click next time. A setup keeps each stranger’s language and location, nothing it saw.

Compare takes a screenshot of every stranger in the window and puts them side by side with their captions, ready to save as one image.

A strip saved by Compare.

What It Can’t Do Yet

Unweb is honest about its edges, and the reference lists them all. The big ones: every stranger on one computer shares its screen, fonts and hardware, so a site that fingerprints devices could link them. And on macOS, a stranger whose proxy is down goes direct from your own address, which macOS does whatever Unweb tells it. On Windows and Linux a stranger with a dead proxy loads nothing.

Unweb is free and open source under the Apache License 2.0. Download it, or read how it was tested.