The vault has always been a good reading surface. You import a page, and it sits there as clean markdown — no ads, no chrome, no popups. But until now, the moment you clicked a link inside that page, the spell broke: a new browser tab, the original site's full layout, you back where you started.
That ends today. Any document in your vault that came from a web page is now a navigable surface. Click a link, and the next page is fetched, converted to markdown, and displayed right where you were. A small back button keeps your trail. You never leave the vault.
How it feels
Open a Wikipedia article from the knowledge graph (click a node, pick a result, the article opens in the viewer). Now click a link inside it. Instead of a new tab, the viewer fades and reloads with the linked page — same clean markdown, same reading layout. Click again. Click a third time. Hit the back button, twice. You're browsing the web as markdown, in a single pane, without ever losing your chat context.
The same applies to anything you save from the chat with Add to vault. Reopen the document later, and its links are alive. The vault doc remembers where it came from, and the viewer treats it as the entry point to a small markdown-only web.
What stays the same
Local files — your .md, .pdf, .docx, .html imports — render exactly as before. Their links, if they have any, behave normally. The mini-browser only kicks in for documents that have a known source URL on the web. We didn't change how you read your own files.
Modifier-clicks (Ctrl, Cmd, Shift, middle-click) still open links in a new browser tab. The escape hatch is always there. If you want the real page in your real browser, two extra fingers get you there.
Under the hood, briefly
Fetches go through the extension's background worker, which sidesteps the cross-origin restrictions that would otherwise block in-page link navigation on most sites. The fetched HTML runs through the same Readability-based extraction we use for page Q&A, then gets sanitized with DOMPurify before it lands in the viewer — scripts, inline handlers, and exotic attributes are stripped. Nothing the page sends can execute.
What it isn't (yet)
It's an honest mini-browser, not a perfect one. Readability is great at the body of articles but sometimes drops sidebar context or rich-formatted callouts. Some sites refuse to cooperate with the background fetch — typically the ones that gate everything behind a login or aggressive bot detection. When a fetch fails you get a toast and stay on the current page; the back stack is preserved.
There's no forward button yet (the data structure is there, the UI isn't), no URL bar to type a destination directly, and no link interception inside local files. Each of those is a small step, and we'll take them as the use case asks for them.
For now: open a vault doc that came from the web, and click around. The vault just got a lot more useful as a reading environment.