ÆTHER is a research browser that runs its intelligence on your own machine.
This document is the position behind that sentence. Every principle below names the mechanism that makes it true, because a principle you cannot point at in the source is a slogan. The last section names what ÆTHER does not do — that section is load-bearing, not a disclaimer.
Capture is a button. Answering is a button. Model downloads are a choice with the size printed on it. There is no background indexing, no silent sync, no "improving your experience".
Opt-in is not a settings page here — it is the shape of the app. The only work that happens is work you started.
Embeddings and answers run locally through llama.cpp on weights sitting in your own filesystem. Once the models are on disk, the intelligence works with the network cable unplugged.
Not "private cloud". Not "we don't train on your data". There is no server.
AiON answers from pages you chose to keep, and cites them. Every claim is one click from the source you already judged worth saving.
An assistant that reads for you makes you dependent. An assistant that reads with you makes you faster. We build the second one.
No crawler. No link-following. No frontier queue. No prefetching pages you might want. ÆTHER fetches exactly the URLs you point it at, and stops.
Your library grows by your judgement, not by a scraper's appetite.
AI summaries take an author's work and return nothing — no visit, no reader, no reason to keep publishing. That trade ends with an empty web, and then with empty summaries.
So ÆTHER asks search engines for results without AI answers, on by default, using each engine's own documented opt-out. It sends you to the source rather than around it. Every principle here that helps a researcher also pays the person who wrote the page.
The iCE explorer maps a subject from its surface to its specialist layers — not to answer your question, but to show you which questions exist.
Instant answers flatten a topic into one paragraph. Research is the part where you find out how much you didn't know. ÆTHER is built to make that part rewarding instead of tedious.
The index exists to serve the person who built it. That is the whole test, and it decides real design details: favicons are cached in memory only and thrown away when you quit, because a favicon cache written to disk is a list of every site you visited under another name.
The web remains the source. ÆTHER keeps only the local research layer it derives from sources you chose: extracted text, provenance, embeddings, connections, notes, maps, and answers. Those local stores can be backed up and exported whole. No account, no sign-in, no proprietary document vault. Nothing is held hostage to a subscription, because there is no subscription.
You can leave and take everything. That is the only version of data ownership that means anything.
Once captured, extracted text and its fingerprint remain stable. A later change to the live page may be detected, but it never silently rewrites the research record you originally saved. There is no refresh-in-place pipeline and no background recapture. Persistence means the evidence you used yesterday is still the evidence you can retrieve tomorrow.
Enshittification needs a mechanism: ads to insert, engagement to farm, a free tier to squeeze, telemetry to justify it. ÆTHER has none of them and never sends analytics, crash reports, or usage data anywhere.
It cannot get worse for you to make it better for someone else. There is no someone else.
On WebKit, blocked requests are refused inside the network path — a tracker learns nothing, not even that something was attempted. Third-party cookies are blocked there too — on Windows they are not, and the app says so rather than implying otherwise. Click identifiers are stripped from URLs on navigation and on capture, so an ad attribution never gets a permanent home in your library.
Point ÆTHER at a proxy — Tor's port comes prefilled — and the app routes its own traffic the same way: favicons, capture re-fetches, model downloads included. Nothing is exempted for speed, because traffic you believe is proxied and quietly isn't is worse than a slow download you can see.
When the route cannot be honoured it fails closed, refusing to resolve any host rather than quietly going direct. Hostnames are handed to the proxy rather than resolved locally, because a hidden IP address paired with a visible DNS query for every site is most of the leak back again.
Off until you turn it on — as is pinning your timezone to UTC, which patches
Intl.resolvedOptions, where fingerprinting scripts actually look.
The app reports its own coverage per platform rather than claiming a uniform story: where third-party cookie blocking is unavailable, the Settings screen says so; where a search engine offers no AI opt-out, it says that too, naming the engine.
A privacy claim that quietly stops being true is worse than one never made. Honesty here is a feature with tests behind it.
There is no server.
No cloud. No account. No subscription. No telemetry. Nothing to enshittify.
The AI reads what you chose. Nothing else.
Every claim is one click from its source.
We send you to the source, not around it.
The web survives if people visit it.
Opt-in by architecture, not by checkbox.
A browser with a memory — and the memory is yours.
It cannot degrade. There's nothing pointed at you.
Research is the part where you find out how much you didn't know.
Every item here is deliberate. A document about integrity that overstates its case refutes itself.
- It is not anonymity. Tabs are ordinary system webviews. Sites see your TLS fingerprint and the usual canvas, WebGL and font fingerprinting surface, and ÆTHER cannot defend against those without shipping its own engine. Two of the easy bits can be taken off the table — a proxy such as Tor hides your IP address, and timezone pinning reports UTC and a fixed locale — and both are off until you turn them on. Neither is anonymity. An unchanged fingerprint still links your sessions to each other, and a hidden IP does not fix that. If you need anonymity, you want Tor Browser.
- Protection is not uniform across platforms. Third-party cookie blocking is unavailable on Windows. Storage partitioning is opt-in and macOS 14+ only. Proxying needs macOS 14+ and is unavailable on Android; timezone pinning is desktop-only. The app tells you which you have.
- The blocklist is curated and small, not a full filter list. It covers the large ad and analytics networks and will miss a long tail.
- A local model is not a better model. It is a model that cannot leak. Answers can still be wrong — which is exactly why they are built from sources you can open and check.
- AI-free search depends on the engines. These are documented opt-outs, not guarantees; an engine can withdraw one without notice, and that failure is silent.
- It is not open source. The source is public and auditable, and ÆTHER ships under PolyForm Strict 1.0.0: noncommercial use is permitted, redistribution is not. A standing grant in CONTRIBUTING.md lets anyone fork and modify it to contribute, and patch their own copy — but passing it on to someone else, paid or free, is the line. See LICENSING.md.
- Releases are unsigned. See SIGNING.md.
For the full technical account, including the complete list of known gaps, see SECURITY.md.