v1.3.0 — Runs in more browsers, cheaper on long tasks

v1.3.0 — Runs in more browsers, cheaper on long tasks

This release gets Pie working in Chromium browsers where the side panel never showed up (Arc, most visibly), makes long multi-step tasks noticeably cheaper by keeping the model's prompt cache warm, adds a per-provider rate limit so you stop hitting your provider's ceiling mid-task, and puts a one-click problem report under the agent's replies.

Works in browsers without a working side panel

Some Chromium browsers accept Chrome's side-panel API but never actually display the panel — the call succeeds, and nothing appears. Pie now measures whether the panel really showed up instead of trusting the API's answer, and falls back to opening the same panel in its own window docked to the right edge of your browser window.

• Automatic, with a manual override — Pie sets the mode itself when it detects the problem. You can force either mode from the extension's right-click menu or Settings → Open Pie in a separate window; your choice always wins over detection.
• One panel per browser window, and a running task survives the panel losing focus.
• Chrome behavior is unchanged.

Long tasks cost less

Long-running tasks were re-sending context the provider could have served from cache. Three changes together lift the cache hit rate substantially on multi-step work:

• Prompt-cache breakpoints for the Anthropic-wire providers (Claude, DeepSeek, MiniMax, MiMo), so repeated context is billed at cache-read rates instead of full input rates.
• No more sliding history window — trimming the front of the history invalidated the cache on every turn, which cost more than the tokens it saved.
• Slimmer page reads — read_page was spending most of a page snapshot on interactive-control markup. That payload is much smaller now, which shrinks every turn that follows it.

Rate limit control

• Requests per minute, per instance — set your provider's limit in the instance settings (empty means unlimited). When the limit is reached, requests queue and wait instead of failing, and the chat shows a countdown while Pie waits.
• Model list rows in provider settings are now proper rows with clearer per-model information.

Report a problem from the chat

• A report icon appears under the agent's last reply. It opens a drawer where you can describe what went wrong and send the report with the conversation attached — prompts, tool calls, and tool results — so the failure can actually be traced.
• What gets sent is spelled out in the drawer and in PRIVACY.md: the transcript includes page content the agent read during the task. Nothing is sent unless you press send.
• The old report_issue skill, which asked you to paste details into a public GitHub issue by hand, is gone — this replaces it.

Context card rework

• The ring now shows context size, not cost. It previously read from the provider's raw input-token count, which excludes cached tokens on Anthropic-wire providers — at a 90% cache hit the ring showed a tenth of your real context.
• Cache hit rate for the session is shown below the total. Per-call ratios were misleading: the turn that reads a page always dips, which looked like a bug.
• An explainer next to the title covers why context shrinks after a task finishes — intermediate steps are replaced by a summary.

Fixes

• open_url no longer fails on cross-origin redirects — a plain apex-to-www redirect (or any server-side redirect that lands on a different origin) was reported as a navigation failure even though the tab had opened fine, leaving the agent unable to focus it. Redirects are now followed, the tab is pinned at the origin it actually landed on, and the observation records both ends of the redirect.
• Expired subscriptions get the full sign-up flow again — when a subscription or redeemed plan lapsed, the settings page dead-ended on "no active subscription" with a single monthly-checkout button. It now shows the same monthly/yearly choice, first-period discount, and redemption-code entry that new users see.
• Stopping a task no longer locks the pinned-tab dropdown — after you pressed stop (or the service worker was killed mid-task), the session kept its task-time tab pin and greyed out the entire dropdown, including the "Auto" row you would have used to unlock it. The dropdown is now disabled only while a task is actually running; the pin left behind by a stopped task stays put for follow-ups but can be changed at any time.