---
id: "vault-mini-browser"
date: "2026-04-07"
title: "Click any link, stay in the vault — the document viewer is now a markdown mini-browser"
summary: "Web pages saved to your vault are now navigable: click any link inside them to fetch, convert, and display the next page right in the viewer, with a back button and no new tab in sight."
image: "/medias/md.pink.jpg"
header: "Feature"
tags: ["vault", "ux", "navigation", "wikipedia"]
---

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.

---

[Read on site](https://daneel.injen.io/news/vault-mini-browser.html?utm_source=extension_news_reader&utm_medium=extension_settings&utm_campaign=extension)