Vex：基于 Electron + Chromium 的隐私桌面浏览器，内置 AI 智能体

A browser built just for you.

A fast, private, deeply customizable desktop browser built on Electron + Chromium — with a built‑in AI agent, real DRM streaming, Tor & censorship bypass, password/2FA/email‑code autofill, sidebar apps, split screen, and a UI you can literally rearrange to the pixel.

⬇ Download the latest release · 🌐 Website

What is Vex?

Vex is a Chromium desktop browser (via castLabs Electron, so Widevine DRM works — Netflix, Spotify, Prime, Disney+ all play). It pairs a private, ad‑free, resource‑light browsing core with an unusually deep set of built‑in tools: an AI assistant that can act on your tabs, sidebar app panels, Tor and DPI‑bypass privacy, encrypted sync, and a customize‑everything UI. Nothing here is a paid add‑on — it's all in the browser.

Windows 10/11 · 64‑bit. Install the signed build from Releases (DRM/Widevine only works in the signed build). Vex updates itself in the app.

Highlights

• 🧠 Built‑in AI agent — chat over your pages, "close all YouTube tabs" in plain English, screenshot‑to‑code, summarize/translate, content‑search everything you've read. Cloud (your own Claude worker), local (Ollama), or fully on‑device (WebGPU).
• 🔒 Private by default — ad + tracker blocking (network and cosmetic), fingerprint protection, DNS‑over‑HTTPS, HTTPS‑only, one‑click Tor, and a DPI/censorship‑bypass proxy — no VPN, no admin.
• ▶️ Real streaming — Widevine DRM playback for Netflix/Spotify/Prime/Disney+, plus codec fallbacks so short‑video sites just play.
• 🎨 A browser built for you — drag‑rearrange the entire toolbar & sidebar, Classic or frosted Glass UI, per‑site profiles, shareable setups, themes.
• 🧩 Sidebar apps — Discord, WhatsApp, Spotify, Netflix, Claude, GitHub, Roblox and any site you pin — each in its own isolated session, with unread badges.
• 🔐 Autofill that actually works — encrypted password vault, built‑in 2FA authenticator with autofill, and email verification‑code autofill.
• 💤 Light on resources — auto‑sleep/hibernate idle tabs (with a "never sleep" you can trust), a memory‑ceiling guard, and a Tab Health dashboard.

New in 2.35 – 2.36

• Profiles — a separate Vex for each person or purpose: its own tabs, bookmarks, history, passwords, extensions, sync account and cookies. Profiles run side by side, each in its own window — manage them from the profile button on the toolbar or Settings › Profiles.
• Import from your old browser — bookmarks and history from Chrome, Edge, Brave or Firefox, read on this PC. Passwords come over from a CSV you export from that browser's own password manager; Vex never opens another browser's encrypted stores.
• Install from the Chrome Web Store — click Add to Vex on a Web Store page. Vex fetches the package from Google's own update server and installs it only if the developer's and the Web Store's signatures check out.
• Updates inside the app — a full‑screen cover shows the download; Vex checks the installer's size and SHA‑512 against the release before running it, downloads only the parts that changed when it can, and saves a backup of your profile right before installing.
• A page's dialog stays in its tab — an alert, confirm or prompt from a page or sidebar panel shows over that tab or panel only, instead of freezing the whole window; if the window ever stops responding, Vex offers to reload it.
• Privacy by default — what you type goes only to the search engine you chose (never from private or Tor tabs), the New Tab weather no longer looks you up by IP, SponsorBlock starts off, setup has a Privacy choices step, and the startup update check can be turned off. PRIVACY.md lists what Vex sends, and to whom.

Every feature

🗂 Browsing & tabs

• Tabs your way — horizontal (Chrome‑style top bar) or vertical (left sidebar) layout.
• Tab groups + AI auto‑grouping — clusters open tabs into named groups and remembers the pattern so future tabs auto‑join (Organize My Tabs, Ctrl+Shift+G).
• Tab sleep / wake / hibernate — idle tabs sleep with scroll restore; Tab Health dashboard shows every tab by state (active · kept‑awake · awake · hibernated · sleeping · not‑loaded) with live memory and one‑click sleep/wake/keep‑awake.
• Private routing — all of Vex through Tor or a proxy you name, applied to every tab and container at once and checkable: Vex asks what address the internet sees with the route and without it, and shows you both. Not a VPN service — it routes the browser.
• Skins — Ctrl+K → Skin: nineteen textures for Vex’s own surfaces (dots, graph paper, honeycomb, circuitry, contours, terrazzo, grain…) drawn in your theme’s ink at a strength you choose, five corner shapes and four kinds of shadow. On top of any theme and any browser look; web pages are never touched.
• The font Vex wears — Ctrl+K → Font: 23 faces for the interface (Times New Roman by default, plus Segoe UI, Calibri, Georgia, Garamond, Cambria…) and 5 for code, applied to every panel, menu and the new tab page. All already on the machine; nothing is downloaded.
• Everything Vex can do, in the Library — all 221 features on named shelves, searchable, with Ask Vex what you don’t know at the top — say what you are trying to do and it names the features for it: what each is for, the paragraph that says when to reach for it and what surprises people, where it lives, what to do, and three buttons — Open it, Show me, Ask Vex about this.
• Running tasks — right‑click any tab or panel → "What is this using?" for what is inside THAT app: JavaScript held, how far the page has grown, sites embedded in it, what it keeps on your disk — and the things that really lower it (reload it, clear its cache, let it sleep). Or Ctrl+K → Running Tasks for every process Vex runs, biggest first and named ("Panel: Discord — 1,013 MB"), with End on each: once, or kept off for an hour, eight hours, or until you let it back.
• "Never sleep" (keep awake) — pin a tab so it stays live and loaded in the background (right‑click a tab → ☕).
• Split screen — 2, 3, or 4 panes side‑by‑side (2×2 for four) — Ctrl+Shift+S.
• Tab preview on hover, pin/unpin, mute tab / mute others.
• Picture‑in‑Picture — pop any video into a floating always‑on‑top window (Ctrl+Shift+P).
• Peek — Shift‑click a link to preview it in a floating card without leaving the page.
• Mouse gestures — hold right‑drag for back/forward/close/etc.
• Smart address bar — autosuggest from open tabs + history, keyword search engines, and DuckDuckGo !bang shortcuts.
• Command bar (Ctrl+K) — one launcher for URLs, search, panels, tools and every command below, fuzzy‑ranked by use.
• Personalized start page — localized greeting & clock, live weather (city or IP), GitHub stats & recent activity, a daily verse (Qur'an live‑fetched, Bible/Tanakh, or Stoic quotes — or off), and a customizable speed‑dial with search‑engine switcher.
• QR‑to‑phone, image zoom lightbox, find in page, reader zoom (per‑site).
• Container / Off‑the‑Record / Identity tabs — isolated‑cookie sessions (ready‑made Work / Personal / Shopping containers for multiple accounts), ephemeral tabs, or a fresh fingerprint per tab.
• Opens apps, not dead links — roblox://, spotify:, steam:, vscode:, obsidian:, zoommtg:, mailto: and more are handed off to your installed apps.

🔐 Privacy & security

• Ad & tracker blocking — pattern blocker + full EasyList/EasyPrivacy/uBlock filter engine, network and cosmetic (element hiding).
• Privacy Dashboard — live count of trackers & ads blocked, fingerprint/DNS status.
• Fingerprint protection — canvas/WebGL/audio randomization + navigator normalization.
• DNS‑over‑HTTPS (Cloudflare/Google/Quad9), HTTPS‑only mode.
• Tor, one click — Vex downloads and launches the official Tor Expert Bundle itself; a Tor tab routes every request and DNS through Tor. No Tor Browser needed.
• DPI / censorship bypass — a built‑in local proxy defeats DNS + SNI blocking (no VPN, no admin), plus a ByeDPI userspace desync mode for stubborn blocks (used for the Discord panel).
• Per‑container routing — send a whole container or session through Tor or a custom SOCKS/HTTP proxy, persistently (Route Through Tor / Proxy).
• Site permissions manager — geolocation, mic, camera, notifications, WebHID/WebUSB, screen‑share picker — allow/deny & remember.
• Private window, clear browsing / per‑site data, location override.

🧠 AI

• Vex AI assistant (Ctrl+Shift+A) — chat over the current page, selection, or many tabs.
• AI Router — routes each feature to Cloud (Claude, via your own Cloudflare Worker), local Ollama, or on‑device WebLLM (WebGPU); Auto / Prefer‑local / Always‑cloud, with per‑feature overrides.
• Ask Vex to do something… — plain‑English commands understood locally & offline ("close all youtube tabs", "sleep the others", "group my github tabs", "split screen"), with an AI fallback for the rest.
• AI Tab Command — natural‑language tab management with a confirm‑before‑closing plan.
• Selection AI bar — Explain / Summarize / Translate on any highlighted text.
• Summarize page · Explain · Translate · Compare/summarize all tabs.
• Screenshot → Code — capture a page, AI rebuilds it as HTML / Tailwind / React.
• Recall — local full‑text search of every page you've read ("what was that article…").
• AI history indexing & semantic search — find pages by meaning, indexed on‑device.
• AI Personas — 5 built‑in + custom personalities, a different persona per tab, and @mention switching mid‑chat.
• AI Memory — facts you tell it once, injected into every chat (works on cloud and local).
• AI Skills — saved reusable prompts that each become their own Ctrl+K command.
• AI Scheduler — recurring headless agent tasks on a daily/weekly/monthly or 5‑field cron schedule, with missed‑run catch‑up.
• MCP client — connect to Streamable‑HTTP Model Context Protocol servers and run their tools (also exposed to the agent).
• Show thinking (brain button in the AI panel, or Ctrl+K) — watch a reasoning model (qwen3.5, deepseek‑r1…) think: its latest thought as a live line under Thinking…, in chat and in the agent's steps, the full reasoning one click away. Off by default, because thinking makes a local model several times slower.
• Catch Me Up (AI digest of feeds + read‑later), AI Compose (rewrites straight into the focused field).

▶️ Media & streaming

• Gets out of a game's way — when a full‑screen game starts (detected the way Windows holds back notifications during games), Vex unloads the AI model from the graphics card, sleeps background tabs (not music, calls or kept‑awake ones) and holds background AI until you're back. A question you ask mid‑game is still answered, and the model leaves the card straight after. The local AI model now unloads 1 minute after a reply instead of Ollama's 5 (Settings › Gaming).
• Widevine / DRM playback — Netflix, Spotify, Prime Video, Disney+, etc. (signed build).
• Codec & site fixes — Spotify DRM‑robustness fallback, an HEVC/H.265 mask so TikTok/Instagram fall back to playable codecs, a Discord "stay‑connected in the panel" spoof, a Google "this browser may not be secure" sign‑in fix, and passkey‑prompt suppression — all automatic.
• Screen‑share settings — when a site asks to share your screen (Discord "Go Live", Meet…), Vex's picker lets you choose the source, resolution (up to 1440p), FPS (15/30/60), whether to share system audio, and whether to show the cursor — Discord‑style quality control, no Nitro required.
• Media Grabber — find and save the video/audio playing on a page.
• Master Volume — one 0–500% slider across every tab.
• Read Aloud (TTS), Now Playing media hub, cookie‑banner auto‑dismiss.

🧩 Sidebar apps & panels

• App web‑panels — WhatsApp, Claude, Spotify, Netflix, Discord (with a stay‑connected fix + optional Vencord), GitHub, Roblox — each in its own persistent isolated session.
• Pin any site to the sidebar as a web panel; unread badges from each app's title appear on its icon.
• Native panels — Notes & Scratchpad, Downloads, Library (Read Later + auto‑archive), Bookmarks (folders), Feeds (RSS), Highlights, Recall, Authenticator, Privacy, History, Memory, Schedules, Queue, Shortcuts.

🔑 Autofill & logins

• Password vault — encrypted at rest with the OS keychain (DPAPI/safeStorage); offers to save on login, autofills on return.
• Authenticator (2FA/TOTP) — generate codes for Discord/GitHub/Roblox/etc., and autofill the 6‑digit code on 2FA screens.
• Passkeys — Vex is a passkey provider: sites that offer "Sign in with a passkey" work in tabs and side panels, the private key stays in Vex's encrypted store (Settings › Passkeys), your Vex PIN is the user verification, and sync is off unless you turn it on.
• Email‑code autofill — reads the newest verification code from your Gmail and fills it — even from a backgrounded Gmail, or (opt‑in) a hidden background Gmail with no tab open at all.
• Logins & Codes hub — all three systems in one place with per‑site success rates.

📖 Reading & accessibility

• Reading Mode (Ctrl+Alt+R), Bionic reading, Speed Read (RSVP).
• Read Free (metered‑paywall bypass), Copy Unlock (defeat select/right‑click blockers).
• Doc extractor (pull text from Google Docs / copy‑locked pages, OCR).
• Translate page / selection, accessibility pack (dyslexia font, color‑blind filter, reading ruler).
• Annotations / Highlights — persistent highlighting that reappears on revisit.

🛠 Productivity

• Notes & Clip‑to‑Notes, Read Later / Library, Bookmarks, Feeds (RSS).
• Record the Screen (Ctrl+K) — pick a screen or a window in the same picker as screen share, with its sound if you want it; saved as a WebM video (VP9 + Opus — plays in Windows Media Player, Chrome, VLC and Discord). Written to disk as it records, so long recordings don't fill memory; a red pill shows the time with Stop and Discard.
• Whiteboard (Ctrl+K) — a blank page to sketch on with the same tools as Mark Up; save or copy it as a picture. Closing after you've drawn asks first, because a sketch can't be taken again the way a screenshot can.
• Mark Up This Page (Ctrl+K) — pen, highlighter, box, arrow, text, and redact: pixelate an email, a name or a balance before you share the picture. Redaction replaces the pixels in the saved image; it isn't a layer that can be removed.
• Screenshot the Whole Page (Ctrl+K) — top to bottom in one image, stitched from screenfuls; lazy images are loaded first and a pinned header appears once. A very long page is scaled down; past about 30,000 pixels you get the top and are told so.
• Save Page as PDF / as One File (Ctrl+K) — straight to a PDF with no print dialog, or the whole page as a single .mhtml that opens offline.
• Open a List of Links (Ctrl+K) — paste links in any form; each opens in its own tab.
• Images on This Page (Ctrl+K) — every picture at the largest size offered; save one or all.
• Mail (Ctrl+K) — a read-only inbox for Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud or any IMAP account: the newest 50 messages and each one as text. Reading here never marks mail read or changes the mailbox, pictures and remote content are never loaded (no tracking pixels), and Reply in Gmail opens that message in the webmail. Signs in with an app password, stored encrypted by Windows. Outlook.com/Hotmail can't be used: Microsoft no longer allows password sign-in for mail programs.
• Dictate (Ctrl+Alt+D, or Ctrl+K) — speak, and the words are typed where your cursor was, in a web page or in Vex. Whisper runs on this PC (Base 73 MB or Small 238 MB, downloaded once after asking, then offline); nothing you say leaves the computer. It uses the graphics card, except while a game is running, and lets the model go after two idle minutes. Pick the language you speak in Dictation Settings.
• Do it again — the Clock keeps your recent timers as one-click Again chips and offers alarms you set before to Set again; Remind me lists past reminders to set again with a new time (text, link and repeat kept); Ctrl+K Do That Again (or Ctrl+Alt+A while the Vex window has focus) re-runs the last command; and the link, speed, accessibility and crawl checks open with what changed since the last run on that page, with Run again and a Recent Page Checks list.
• Crawl This Site (Ctrl+K) — follows links across the site you're on (up to 200 pages) and lists what to fix: broken pages with the page that links to each, server errors, missing or duplicate titles, missing descriptions, and pages hidden from search. Obeys robots.txt (including Crawl-delay), runs from an empty session, reads only HTML, and never in private or Tor tabs.
• Check This Page's Links (Ctrl+K) — which links are broken, which moved, which just need a login; Show on page outlines the one to fix. Checked from an empty session, so no cookies go out; never run in private or Tor tabs.
• Why Is This Page Slow? (Ctrl+K) — load timings (server, first paint, main content, layout shift) graded against Google's Core Web Vitals, with the culprits in words: heaviest files, pictures sent far bigger than shown, scripts blocking the first paint, third‑party weight, an oversized page.
• Check Accessibility of This Page (Ctrl+K) — pictures with no description, form boxes with no label, buttons and links with no name, text too faint to read (WCAG contrast), headings that skip levels, a missing language or title — in plain words, each outlined on the page. The common, certain failures, not a full audit.
• Cite This Page (Ctrl+K) — APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago or BibTeX from the page's own metadata.
• To-do List (Ctrl+K) — every open - [ ] item from every note in one list; tick it there and it's ticked in its note. Add tasks in a keystroke (they go in a "To-do" note); @tomorrow or @2026-10-03 gives one a date, and overdue ones come first.
• Price History (Ctrl+K) — when you open a product page that publishes its price for search engines (schema.org Product, or product:price tags), Vex notes it, one point per day. On that page later, see what it cost each time you looked, the lowest you've seen, and a chart; other products you looked at are listed with how much they've gone up or down. Local only, never in private or Tor tabs, and it can be switched off. It doesn't check shops by itself.
• Calendar (Ctrl+K) — a month view of your reminders (a repeating one shows on every day it repeats) and the dated to-dos in your notes; tick to-dos there, or add a reminder on any day. The week starts where your locale starts it. It's not linked to Google or Outlook, which would need your account there.
• Parcels (Ctrl+K) — paste a tracking number; Vex recognises the carrier (UPS, USPS, FedEx, DHL, Royal Mail, Canada Post, Australia Post, Amazon; check digits verified where the format has them) and opens the carrier's own tracking page. Keeps a labelled list of what you're waiting for. It doesn't fetch status itself, since that needs an account with each carrier, so nothing is sent until you press Track.
• Expenses (Ctrl+K) — log what you spent (amount, category, note, day); see the month by category and against last month, in your chosen currency; export CSV. Kept on this computer, counted in whole cents so totals are exact.
• Habits (Ctrl+K) — tick off each day you did something; see the streak you're on and your best. The last seven days stay tickable, and a streak only breaks once a whole day passes unticked.
• Task Board (Ctrl+K, or Board in the To-do list) — the same tasks in To do / Doing / Done columns. Drag a card or use its arrows; "Doing" adds @doing to the task's line and "Done" ticks it, so the board is just another view of your notes.
• Research Projects (Ctrl+K) — a folder for one topic: the pages you found, your notes, and the AI conversations about it. The chat is the part every browser loses, because it belongs to a tab and tabs close. Open every page at once; export the lot as Markdown.
• Eyedropper (Ctrl+K) — sample the colour of any pixel on screen, not just in the page: a video, a PDF, another program. Copies the hex; keeps the last dozen in hex/rgb/hsl.
• Snippets (Ctrl+K) — an abbreviation that becomes the text you keep retyping: your address, an invoice footer, a reply you send weekly. Type it in any box on any page and press Tab. Nothing expands while you type.
• Clipboard History (Ctrl+K) — the thing you copied before the thing you copied. Only copies made on web pages, never your other programs; private and Tor tabs are never recorded, and nothing is kept after you close Vex unless you pin it.
• Web Monitor — get alerted when a page changes (restocks, status pages) + Wayback archiving.
• Focus Mode — hide chrome + block distracting sites for 25/50 min; Compact Mode.
• Sessions (save/restore named tab sets, auto‑save), Workspaces, Workspace Time‑Travel.
• Resource Monitor, Memory guard (sleep idle tabs above a memory ceiling), Downloads manager, History (keyword + AI semantic search), Send to Phone (hand a tab to your other Vex devices).
• Command Chains — bundle several commands into one macro (e.g. Reading Mode → Read Aloud); your first three run with Ctrl+Alt+1/2/3.
• Personal Queue — a sidebar backed by your own Telegram queue bot, with done/delete.
• Export All Data — download everything Vex stores as JSON (and Reset to Defaults).

👩‍💻 Developer tools

• API Client (built‑in REST + JSON‑tree viewer), Format JSON, Responsive Preview, DevTools (F12), spellcheck.

🎨 Customization

• Simple mode — a calm Vex for newcomers: tabs, address bar, Back/Forward/Reload, bookmarks, history, downloads, notes, privacy and Settings, with advanced settings folded away. Nothing is removed — All features in the toolbar (or Settings › General) shows everything again, and the settings search always finds every setting. New profiles choose it in setup; existing profiles stay as they were.
• Layout Editor — drag to reorder or hide every toolbar button and sidebar icon in place; move whole toolbar sections; one‑click Default / Essentials / Minimal presets.
• GUI Style — Classic (your themes) or Glass (frosted UI, tabs on top, speed‑dial shortcuts bar).
• Themes — multi‑theme picker (Ctrl+Shift+Y).
• Your own themes — Settings › Appearance › Your themes: start from any theme and change its colours with a live preview, contrast warnings and Fix contrast; make one from a picture or your Windows wallpaper; share it as a .vextheme file (it syncs too). Light and dark wears a light theme by day and a dark one at night.
• Chrome Web Store themes — Add to Vex on a theme's store page (or its link, id or .crx): signatures checked like an extension, then made one of your themes, colours fixed to read at 4.5:1 and its picture on the New Tab page. Never loaded as an extension; a theme package with code is refused.
• Per‑site Settings — remembered zoom, forced dark mode, and custom CSS/JS Boosts (Zap‑to‑hide any element) per website.
• Setup Gallery — save, name, share and switch whole setups (panels, shortcuts, theme) via portable VEXSETUP1 codes.
• Custom Tools bar — pin any web app as a one‑click shortcut (drag‑reorder, edit, remove).
• Keyboard shortcuts you control — rebind any of them, and give a key to anything that has none: every one of the 250+ Ctrl+K commands can have one (Shortcuts panel, or Settings). Customizable sidebar (rename/re‑icon/reorder/hide/re‑link), Chrome extension support (install from the Chrome Web Store, a folder or a ZIP; Vencord for Discord).

☁️ Sync

• Vex Sync — end‑to‑end encrypted (AES‑GCM‑256) sync of tabs, bookmarks, history and settings across devices, via your own self‑hosted Cloudflare Worker. A hex recovery code is your key.

🚀 Onboarding & discovery

• Discover (Ctrl+K → Discover) — every feature in this list, inside the browser, in 12 categories with a search box. Each one says what it is for, and has Show me (spotlights the real button on your screen) and Open (runs it). A feature you switched off is still listed, with Turn on & show me. Whole categories can be toured in turn.
• First‑run wizard — a setup profile (The Mortuex Setup / Minimal / Custom / paste a shared code), theme, look (Classic · Glass · Chrome · Firefox · Safari · IE on XP · Netscape on 98, with tab placement), speed, memory & privacy (a preset, or all nine settings individually), job profile, language (EN/TR), daily wisdom, name, weather (country → city/district/postcode picker), GitHub, search engine, default‑browser, and each AI/Sync/password option. Every field is validated: an empty or malformed answer is refused with the reason, so nothing is silently skipped.
• Interactive tour, "What's New" update log, in‑app updates (checked SHA‑512, differential downloads, a profile backup before each install).
• Profiles (toolbar profile button, Settings › Profiles) and Import from Another Browser (Ctrl+K; Chrome, Edge, Brave, Firefox).

Invented for Vex

Features that don't exist in other browsers — built by combining Vex's own stack (agent, containers, vault, Recall, Boosts):

• 🔥 Burner Identity (Ctrl+K) — one click for a throwaway session: an off‑the‑record container (cookies wiped on close) opened on a disposable‑email site, optionally routed through Tor. Sign up for something without it tying back to you.
• 🕵️ Leak Canary — quietly warns when one of your saved emails is already pre‑filled on a site that isn't where you saved it (a tracker leak). A local privacy tripwire, on by default.
• 🧾 Tracker Receipts (Ctrl+K) — a weekly, narrative privacy report with a trend chart: how many trackers were blocked, the worst offenders, and which sites followed you most.
• ⚙️ Automations (Ctrl+K) — if‑this‑then‑that for the browser: when a page URL contains X (or at a time each day) → open a URL, open a panel, or run a command.
• 🎯 Focus Flows (Ctrl+K) — named, composable work modes: one click opens a tab set, switches to a persona, dims the UI, and blocks distracting sites.
• 🎧 Read‑Later as Podcast (Ctrl+K) — hands‑free: Vex reads your saved articles aloud as an auto‑advancing playlist with spoken intros.
• 🎨 AI Restyle (Ctrl+K) — describe a look ("match my dark theme", "declutter", "make it Notion‑like") and the AI writes CSS to restyle the current site, saved as a per‑site Boost.
• 🧾 Universal Form Fill (Ctrl+K → Fill This Form) — one saved profile (name/email/phone/address) fills any signup or checkout form (never card numbers).
• 📝 Sticky Notes per page (Ctrl+K) — a freeform note pinned to a specific URL, reappearing when you return.
• 🔗 Linked split‑scroll (Ctrl+K) — in split screen, scroll one pane and the others follow proportionally.

Keyboard shortcuts

Most shortcuts are rebindable in Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts (a few system‑level ones are fixed).

Power moves (right‑click & gestures)

• Mouse gestures — hold the right button and drag inside a page: ← back · → forward · ↑ scroll to top · ↓ reload · ↓ then → close tab · ↓ then ← reopen last closed tab.
• Rich right‑click menus:
  • Page — Back/Forward/Reload, Copy/Open URL, 🌙 dark‑mode this site, reset this site's settings, Inspect Element.
  • Text selection — Search, 🖍 Highlight, ✨ Explain, 📝 Summarize, 🌐 Translate (all straight into the AI panel).
  • Link — Open in new tab, Copy, 🕰 Open archived version (Wayback).
  • Image — 🔍 Search with Google Lens, 🔎 Zoom, Save/Copy image.
  • Tab — Pin, Duplicate, per‑tab volume, move to group, mute, sleep/wake, ☕ keep awake (1h/5h/12h/24h/custom/never), close others/right.
  • Tab group — rename, recolor, convert to a collapsed stack, ungroup, delete.
  • Sidebar icon — rename, change icon/link, switch service (Netflix ⇄ Prime/Disney+/Roku, Claude ⇄ Gemini/ChatGPT), install Vencord, refresh, hide, reset.

AI setup (bring your own backend)

Cloud AI sends the selected prompt and page context to the configured worker and model provider. Deploy your own Cloudflare Worker and configure its URL and client token in Settings → Cloud Services — see SELF_HOSTING.md. Update checks, blocker lists, enabled start-page services, and model downloads also make network requests. Alternatively:

• Local — install Ollama and Vex talks to it at localhost:11434.
• On‑device — WebGPU runs inference locally after downloading the model and runtime assets.

Sync uses your own self‑hosted Worker the same way.

Private windows use ephemeral sessions and exclude their tabs from saved sessions, history indexing, sync and automated page-context extraction. Downloads and explicitly copied content can outlive the window. Private browsing does not conceal traffic from the network or destination website. Compatibility exceptions such as passkeys are scoped to configured sites. See the implementation and verification tracker for remaining audit work and unverified integrations.

Building from source

Requires Windows and Node.js 22 (what CI uses) with npm — the repo is locked with package-lock.json and Electron comes from a git URL, so use npm, not pnpm or yarn.

git clone https://github.com/0xmortuex/Vex.git
cd Vex
npm install
npm start          # run the dev build
npm test           # run the test suite (vitest)

To build the Windows installer without a castLabs account, skip the Widevine (VMP) signing step — the build is otherwise identical, but DRM playback (Netflix, Spotify…) will not work in it:

$env:VEX_SKIP_VMP_VERIFY = "1"; npm run dist:win     # PowerShell
set VEX_SKIP_VMP_VERIFY=1 && npm run dist:win         # cmd

Without that variable, npm run dist:win VMP‑signs the app through castLabs EVS and stops with an error if it cannot get a production signature. Releases are made with npm run publish; see RELEASING.md.

Note: DRM/Widevine playback requires the VMP‑signed build; the plain dev build (npm start) has no DRM by design.

Under the hood

• Runtime: Electron 42.11.0 (castLabs +wvcus — enables Widevine), Chromium 148, bundled Node. The exact versions are shown live in Settings → About.
• Ad blocking: @ghostery/adblocker-electron with the full EasyList filter set, network + cosmetic.
• Privacy engine: in‑process DoH resolver, SNI/DPI‑bypass CONNECT proxy, ByeDPI SOCKS5, Tor Expert Bundle launcher.
• Security: password vault and TOTP seeds are encrypted at rest through Electron safeStorage. Authorized autofill sends selected passwords or generated codes through the trusted renderer into the destination form; this is not a guarantee that secrets never reach renderer memory.

License & privacy

• License — MIT © 0xmortuex
• Privacy — what Vex sends, where, and what stays on your PC. No analytics, no telemetry.
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• Third-party notices — the open-source software Vex is built on, and its licences.

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