Nightjar Browser 0.3.4

What's new in 0.3.4

Passwords stay away from the AI (security fix). In 0.3.3 and earlier, the value typed into a password box could be included in what the assistant read from a page, and in what the writing assistant was sent when you clicked into the field. Password, one-time-code and payment-card fields are now never read by the assistant, the agent or the writing assistant. Please update.

Use your own password manager. Nightjar doesn't store passwords. Copy-and-paste and auto-type from 1Password, Bitwarden, KeePassXC or any other work as in any app, and the window is now titled after the page, which is how auto-type picks the right login.

/find for whole-document questions. /find "phrase" your question searches the open page and attached files for the phrase, reads every place it appears (and sections headed risks, limitations and the like), and answers with where each point came from. On a long article it found three times as many points as a normal question.

News front pages are read properly. Pages like CNN's home page were read as a single article, which kept a list of side stories and missed the lead. Front pages are now read as their list of headlines.

When the page isn't used, you're told. With the 📄 page chip off, a question that's clearly about the page asks whether to use it. If the model still says it "can't see the page", a note explains why: the page was off, couldn't be read, or the model ignored it.

Activity log is back in the ⋮ menu. It lives in memory only, clears when Nightjar closes, and no longer shows text the agent typed into forms.

---

Test build. Two downloads below — the .zip is Windows, the .dmg is macOS.

Windows

Nobody has launched this yet. CI builds it, packages it and checks the
version resource, which is not the same as it working. If you try it, tell me
what happens either way — that is the single most useful thing a Windows
tester can do right now.

Installing

1. Unzip NightjarBrowser-<version>-windows.zip into a new, empty folder —
   Desktop, Downloads, a USB stick, anywhere. The zip has no folder of its own
   inside it, so extracting it straight into Downloads scatters a thousand
   files there. There is no installer and nothing is written outside the
   folder you choose.
2. Run START-HERE.bat, not the .exe. (The same steps, and what to do if
   Windows blocks it, are at https://trynightjar.com/install.html#windows.)

START-HERE.bat clears the "downloaded from the internet" mark that Windows
puts on every file inside a downloaded zip, and then starts the browser. That
mark is what makes Windows refuse to run an unsigned build — it is the same
job xattr -dr does on macOS. It changes no setting and disables nothing; it
clears one attribute on the files in that folder. Running it after extracting
is the point: the order cannot be got wrong that way.

If Windows blocks it anyway

Windows protected your PC — Microsoft Defender SmartScreen prevented an
unrecognised app from starting.

Click More info, then Run anyway. That is what an unsigned application
looks like, not a sign that anything is wrong. An antivirus quarantining it
has the same cause.

An Application Control policy has blocked this file

This one is Smart App Control, which is stricter than SmartScreen: no "run
anyway", no per-app exception. Please do not turn it off — it cannot be
re-enabled without resetting Windows. Tell me instead and we will find another
way. In practice this build is only testable where Smart App Control is
already off, which includes any machine upgraded from Windows 10. It stops
being a problem once the build is signed with an Authenticode certificate.

What you need

• Windows 10 (version 1903 or newer) or Windows 11, 64-bit.
• .NET Framework 4.7.2+ and the WebView2 runtime — both standard on Windows 10
  1903 and later, so almost certainly already present.
• 4 GB of memory minimum, 16 GB recommended.
• 2 GB of free disk minimum, 10 GB comfortable — the app is small, the model
  is not.
• A graphics card is strongly recommended but not required. CPU-only works,
  and a small model at ~15 tok/s is about as fast as most people read; a 9B
  model on CPU takes two minutes per answer.

First run

The browser works immediately. The AI panel asks which model to download —
1–9 GB depending on which, kept on your machine, once. The Models tab
hides the models that will not run on your hardware and warns about the ones
that will run badly.

The inference runtime is already inside the download, so there is nothing
further to fetch beyond the model itself.

macOS

Apple Silicon only, and read the next section before installing.

You need macOS 26 or newer

The bundled inference engine (llama-server and the ggml Metal library) is
built with a minimum of macOS 26.0 — checked with otool, not assumed. On
anything older the browser installs and browses normally and then fails the
first time you ask it a question, which is a confusing place to find out.

This build is not signed with an Apple Developer ID

macOS will refuse to open it the first time and will say it is damaged or from
an unidentified developer. It is neither — it is unsigned.

Installing

1. Open the .dmg and drag NightjarBrowser into Applications.
2. In Terminal, run: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/NightjarBrowser.app
3. Open it. If macOS still blocks it, go to System Settings → Privacy &
   Security, find the message about NightjarBrowser, and click Open Anyway.

First run

It asks which model to download. Start with Qwen 3.5 2B — 1.2 GB, fine on
any Apple Silicon Mac. The download happens once and is kept on your Mac.
Nothing works until it finishes.

The same steps are at https://trynightjar.com/install.html#macos-preview.

What else you need

• Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or later). Intel is not supported: no unified memory
  and no Apple Silicon GPU, so the model would run on CPU at single-digit
  tokens per second.
• 8 GB of memory minimum, 16 GB comfortable.
• About 4 GB of disk: ~110 MB for the app, the rest for the model.

Known, in every build so far

• Unsigned on both platforms, which is what the steps above are working
  around: ad-hoc signed on macOS, no Authenticode certificate on Windows.
• The app does not update itself. It checks once at launch whether a newer
  release exists (switch that off in Privacy & blocking), as does "Check for
  updates…" in the ⋮ menu, and sends you here; installing is manual.
• Nothing is uploaded. Crash reports are composed as an email you send
  yourself, and exclude your history, page content and chat.

Nightjar Browser 0.3.3

What's new in 0.3.3

Spreadsheet answers are calculated, not guessed. Attach a CSV or Excel file (.xlsx, now supported, every sheet) and ask for a total, an average, a count, the highest or lowest row, a difference or a single value. The model only turns your question into a query. Nightjar works out the answer over every row and shows its working, for example "Total revenue where region = North: 196,185 (96 rows) — calculated by Nightjar from orders.xlsx". On a 400-row file the models read 4 of 6 answers wrong from the text; calculated, Qwen 3.5 4B and 9B got all six right.

Honest when it can't. If a question can't be calculated, a note before the answer says why and whose limit it is: the model couldn't turn the question into a calculation, or the question needs something the calculator doesn't do yet (such as totals per group). The model's own attempt is then marked as one to check. Files too large to read in full, and workbooks whose formulas were never calculated by Excel, are refused rather than given a wrong total.

The page is your choice. The 📄 page chip, now on its own line above the chat box, is off by default and remembers your setting. Ask something about the page while it's off ("summarise this") and Nightjar asks whether to use the page. With it on, a question that has nothing to do with the page is answered without reading it. That makes those answers faster, and small models no longer refuse them.

Guide to everything Nightjar can do: https://trynightjar.com/guide

---

Test build. Two downloads below — the .zip is Windows, the .dmg is macOS.

Windows

Nobody has launched this yet. CI builds it, packages it and checks the
version resource, which is not the same as it working. If you try it, tell me
what happens either way — that is the single most useful thing a Windows
tester can do right now.

Installing

1. Unzip NightjarBrowser-<version>-windows.zip into a new, empty folder —
   Desktop, Downloads, a USB stick, anywhere. The zip has no folder of its own
   inside it, so extracting it straight into Downloads scatters a thousand
   files there. There is no installer and nothing is written outside the
   folder you choose.
2. Run START-HERE.bat, not the .exe. (The same steps, and what to do if
   Windows blocks it, are at https://trynightjar.com/install.html#windows.)

START-HERE.bat clears the "downloaded from the internet" mark that Windows
puts on every file inside a downloaded zip, and then starts the browser. That
mark is what makes Windows refuse to run an unsigned build — it is the same
job xattr -dr does on macOS. It changes no setting and disables nothing; it
clears one attribute on the files in that folder. Running it after extracting
is the point: the order cannot be got wrong that way.

If Windows blocks it anyway

Windows protected your PC — Microsoft Defender SmartScreen prevented an
unrecognised app from starting.

Click More info, then Run anyway. That is what an unsigned application
looks like, not a sign that anything is wrong. An antivirus quarantining it
has the same cause.

An Application Control policy has blocked this file

This one is Smart App Control, which is stricter than SmartScreen: no "run
anyway", no per-app exception. Please do not turn it off — it cannot be
re-enabled without resetting Windows. Tell me instead and we will find another
way. In practice this build is only testable where Smart App Control is
already off, which includes any machine upgraded from Windows 10. It stops
being a problem once the build is signed with an Authenticode certificate.

What you need

• Windows 10 (version 1903 or newer) or Windows 11, 64-bit.
• .NET Framework 4.7.2+ and the WebView2 runtime — both standard on Windows 10
  1903 and later, so almost certainly already present.
• 4 GB of memory minimum, 16 GB recommended.
• 2 GB of free disk minimum, 10 GB comfortable — the app is small, the model
  is not.
• A graphics card is strongly recommended but not required. CPU-only works,
  and a small model at ~15 tok/s is about as fast as most people read; a 9B
  model on CPU takes two minutes per answer.

First run

The browser works immediately. The AI panel asks which model to download —
1–9 GB depending on which, kept on your machine, once. The Models tab
hides the models that will not run on your hardware and warns about the ones
that will run badly.

The inference runtime is already inside the download, so there is nothing
further to fetch beyond the model itself.

macOS

Apple Silicon only, and read the next section before installing.

You need macOS 26 or newer

The bundled inference engine (llama-server and the ggml Metal library) is
built with a minimum of macOS 26.0 — checked with otool, not assumed. On
anything older the browser installs and browses normally and then fails the
first time you ask it a question, which is a confusing place to find out.

This build is not signed with an Apple Developer ID

macOS will refuse to open it the first time and will say it is damaged or from
an unidentified developer. It is neither — it is unsigned.

Installing

1. Open the .dmg and drag NightjarBrowser into Applications.
2. In Terminal, run: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/NightjarBrowser.app
3. Open it. If macOS still blocks it, go to System Settings → Privacy &
   Security, find the message about NightjarBrowser, and click Open Anyway.

First run

It asks which model to download. Start with Qwen 3.5 2B — 1.2 GB, fine on
any Apple Silicon Mac. The download happens once and is kept on your Mac.
Nothing works until it finishes.

The same steps are at https://trynightjar.com/install.html#macos-preview.

What else you need

• Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or later). Intel is not supported: no unified memory
  and no Apple Silicon GPU, so the model would run on CPU at single-digit
  tokens per second.
• 8 GB of memory minimum, 16 GB comfortable.
• About 4 GB of disk: ~110 MB for the app, the rest for the model.

Known, in every build so far

• Unsigned on both platforms, which is what the steps above are working
  around: ad-hoc signed on macOS, no Authenticode certificate on Windows.
• The app does not update itself. It checks once at launch whether a newer
  release exists (switch that off in Privacy & blocking), as does "Check for
  updates…" in the ⋮ menu, and sends you here; installing is manual.
• Nothing is uploaded. Crash reports are composed as an email you send
  yourself, and exclude your history, page content and chat.

Nightjar Browser 0.3.2

What's new in 0.3.2

macOS: the first build to have run on a real Mac. The menus, panels and pop-ups now work instead of drawing as empty boxes. Find, print, save as PDF, zoom, downloads and read aloud work, and there is a proper macOS menu bar with ⌘ shortcuts that work inside pages. The AI now runs on the Mac's GPU (about 6× faster to read a page than 0.3.1, which ran it on the CPU), and PDFs are read for the assistant in the background instead of freezing the window. Install steps: https://trynightjar.com/install-macos.html

Code in the chat looks like code. Code blocks in a reply get their own box in a fixed-width font that keeps indentation, with a Copy button. For JavaScript, TypeScript, JSON, CSS, HTML, Markdown and YAML there is also a Format button, which tidies the layout and can be undone. The formatter is built in; nothing is sent anywhere.

---

Test build. Two downloads below — the .zip is Windows, the .dmg is macOS.

Windows

Nobody has launched this yet. CI builds it, packages it and checks the
version resource, which is not the same as it working. If you try it, tell me
what happens either way — that is the single most useful thing a Windows
tester can do right now.

Installing

1. Unzip NightjarBrowser-<version>-windows.zip into a new, empty folder —
   Desktop, Downloads, a USB stick, anywhere. The zip has no folder of its own
   inside it, so extracting it straight into Downloads scatters a thousand
   files there. There is no installer and nothing is written outside the
   folder you choose.
2. Run START-HERE.bat, not the .exe.

START-HERE.bat clears the "downloaded from the internet" mark that Windows
puts on every file inside a downloaded zip, and then starts the browser. That
mark is what makes Windows refuse to run an unsigned build — it is the same
job xattr -dr does on macOS. It changes no setting and disables nothing; it
clears one attribute on the files in that folder. Running it after extracting
is the point: the order cannot be got wrong that way.

If Windows blocks it anyway

Windows protected your PC — Microsoft Defender SmartScreen prevented an
unrecognised app from starting.

Click More info, then Run anyway. That is what an unsigned application
looks like, not a sign that anything is wrong. An antivirus quarantining it
has the same cause.

An Application Control policy has blocked this file

This one is Smart App Control, which is stricter than SmartScreen: no "run
anyway", no per-app exception. Please do not turn it off — it cannot be
re-enabled without resetting Windows. Tell me instead and we will find another
way. In practice this build is only testable where Smart App Control is
already off, which includes any machine upgraded from Windows 10. It stops
being a problem once the build is signed with an Authenticode certificate.

What you need

• Windows 10 (version 1903 or newer) or Windows 11, 64-bit.
• .NET Framework 4.7.2+ and the WebView2 runtime — both standard on Windows 10
  1903 and later, so almost certainly already present.
• 4 GB of memory minimum, 16 GB recommended.
• 2 GB of free disk minimum, 10 GB comfortable — the app is small, the model
  is not.
• A graphics card is strongly recommended but not required. CPU-only works,
  and a small model at ~15 tok/s is about as fast as most people read; a 9B
  model on CPU takes two minutes per answer.

First run

The browser works immediately. The AI panel asks which model to download —
1–9 GB depending on which, kept on your machine, once. The Models tab
hides the models that will not run on your hardware and warns about the ones
that will run badly.

The inference runtime is already inside the download, so there is nothing
further to fetch beyond the model itself.

macOS

Apple Silicon only, and read the next section before installing.

You need macOS 26 or newer

The bundled inference engine (llama-server and the ggml Metal library) is
built with a minimum of macOS 26.0 — checked with otool, not assumed. On
anything older the browser installs and browses normally and then fails the
first time you ask it a question, which is a confusing place to find out.

This build is not signed with an Apple Developer ID

macOS will refuse to open it the first time and will say it is damaged or from
an unidentified developer. It is neither — it is unsigned.

Installing

1. Open the .dmg and drag NightjarBrowser into Applications.
2. In Terminal, run: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/NightjarBrowser.app
3. Open it. If macOS still blocks it, go to System Settings → Privacy &
   Security, find the message about NightjarBrowser, and click Open Anyway.

First run

It asks which model to download. Start with Qwen 3.5 2B — 1.2 GB, fine on
any Apple Silicon Mac. The download happens once and is kept on your Mac.
Nothing works until it finishes.

The same steps are at https://trynightjar.com/install-macos.html.

What else you need

• Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or later). Intel is not supported: no unified memory
  and no Apple Silicon GPU, so the model would run on CPU at single-digit
  tokens per second.
• 8 GB of memory minimum, 16 GB comfortable.
• About 4 GB of disk: ~110 MB for the app, the rest for the model.

Known, in every build so far

• Unsigned on both platforms, which is what the steps above are working
  around: ad-hoc signed on macOS, no Authenticode certificate on Windows.
• The app does not update itself. It checks once at launch whether a newer
  release exists (switch that off in Privacy & blocking), as does "Check for
  updates…" in the ⋮ menu, and sends you here; installing is manual.
• Nothing is uploaded. Crash reports are composed as an email you send
  yourself, and exclude your history, page content and chat.

Nightjar Browser 0.3.1

What's new in 0.3.1

A newer model catalogue. Qwen 3.5 (2B, 4B, 9B) and Gemma 4 12B replace the 2024 models (Qwen 2.5, Phi-3.5, Llama 3 8B and Gemma 2 9B). Llama 3.2 1B and Gemma 4 E2B/E4B stay. On the browser's own 16-question reading test, Qwen 3.5 2B and Gemma 4 12B both score 16/16. Models you already downloaded keep working.

Longer context on the same hardware. The browser now works out which layers of a model actually keep a memory cache that grows with the conversation. That makes its memory estimate far more accurate for the new models: Gemma 4 12B gets a 32k window on a 12 GB graphics card instead of 4k.

The filter-list refresh obeys its setting. "Update the blocklist automatically" in Privacy & blocking now controls the every-three-days download of the ad and tracker lists. It is on by default.

Lighter download. The zip and the macOS app carry only the licence and the third-party notices. The privacy policy, terms and security page live at trynightjar.com, which is the authoritative copy, with every earlier version archived there.

---

Test build. Two downloads below — the .zip is Windows, the .dmg is macOS.

Windows

Nobody has launched this yet. CI builds it, packages it and checks the
version resource, which is not the same as it working. If you try it, tell me
what happens either way — that is the single most useful thing a Windows
tester can do right now.

Installing

1. Unzip NightjarBrowser-<version>-windows.zip into a new, empty folder —
   Desktop, Downloads, a USB stick, anywhere. The zip has no folder of its own
   inside it, so extracting it straight into Downloads scatters a thousand
   files there. There is no installer and nothing is written outside the
   folder you choose.
2. Run START-HERE.bat, not the .exe.

START-HERE.bat clears the "downloaded from the internet" mark that Windows
puts on every file inside a downloaded zip, and then starts the browser. That
mark is what makes Windows refuse to run an unsigned build — it is the same
job xattr -dr does on macOS. It changes no setting and disables nothing; it
clears one attribute on the files in that folder. Running it after extracting
is the point: the order cannot be got wrong that way.

If Windows blocks it anyway

Windows protected your PC — Microsoft Defender SmartScreen prevented an
unrecognised app from starting.

Click More info, then Run anyway. That is what an unsigned application
looks like, not a sign that anything is wrong. An antivirus quarantining it
has the same cause.

An Application Control policy has blocked this file

This one is Smart App Control, which is stricter than SmartScreen: no "run
anyway", no per-app exception. Please do not turn it off — it cannot be
re-enabled without resetting Windows. Tell me instead and we will find another
way. In practice this build is only testable where Smart App Control is
already off, which includes any machine upgraded from Windows 10. It stops
being a problem once the build is signed with an Authenticode certificate.

What you need

• Windows 10 (version 1903 or newer) or Windows 11, 64-bit.
• .NET Framework 4.7.2+ and the WebView2 runtime — both standard on Windows 10
  1903 and later, so almost certainly already present.
• 4 GB of memory minimum, 16 GB recommended.
• 2 GB of free disk minimum, 10 GB comfortable — the app is small, the model
  is not.
• A graphics card is strongly recommended but not required. CPU-only works,
  and a small model at ~25 tok/s is faster than most people read; a 7B model
  on CPU takes over a minute per answer.

First run

The browser works immediately. The AI panel asks which model to download —
1–9 GB depending on which, kept on your machine, once. The Models tab
hides the models that will not run on your hardware and warns about the ones
that will run badly.

The inference runtime is already inside the download, so there is nothing
further to fetch beyond the model itself.

macOS

Apple Silicon only, and read the next section before installing.

You need macOS 26 or newer

The bundled inference engine (llama-server and the ggml Metal library) is
built with a minimum of macOS 26.0 — checked with otool, not assumed. On
anything older the browser installs and browses normally and then fails the
first time you ask it a question, which is a confusing place to find out.

This build is not signed with an Apple Developer ID

macOS will refuse to open it the first time and will say it is damaged or from
an unidentified developer. It is neither — it is unsigned.

Installing

1. Open the .dmg and drag NightjarBrowser into Applications.
2. In Terminal, run: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/NightjarBrowser.app
3. Open it. If macOS still blocks it, go to System Settings → Privacy &
   Security, find the message about NightjarBrowser, and click Open Anyway.

First run

It asks which model to download. Start with Gemma 4 E2B — 3.2 GB, works on
8 GB of memory. The download happens once and is kept on your Mac. Nothing
works until it finishes.

What else you need

• Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or later). Intel is not supported: no unified memory
  and no Apple Silicon GPU, so the model would run on CPU at single-digit
  tokens per second.
• 8 GB of memory minimum, 16 GB comfortable.
• About 4 GB of disk: ~110 MB for the app, the rest for the model.

Known, in every build so far

• Unsigned on both platforms, which is what the steps above are working
  around: ad-hoc signed on macOS, no Authenticode certificate on Windows.
• The app does not update itself and never checks on its own. "Check for
  updates…" in the ⋮ menu asks whether a newer release exists and sends you
  here; installing is manual.
• Nothing is uploaded. Crash reports are composed as an email you send
  yourself, and exclude your history, page content and chat.

Nightjar Browser 0.3.0

What's new in 0.3.0

Privacy

• Private browsing now really keeps nothing. Since the ad blocker switched
  engines, private browsing only cleared cookies at startup; the web engine
  still wrote every page you visited, its cache and favicons to disk. It now
  runs in InPrivate mode, so none of that reaches the disk.
  If you used an earlier build: close Nightjar and delete the folder
  %LOCALAPPDATA%\NightjarBrowser\EBWebView\Default to remove what was
  already written. Nothing you would miss is in it -- cookies were cleared at
  every start anyway.
• The addresses of your open tabs are erased when you close the browser,
  unless "Reopen my tabs" is on.
• The sites you allowed ads, pop-ups or autocomplete on are encrypted on disk.

A new window

• The tab strip is the title bar, with Nightjar's own minimise, maximise and
  close buttons; drag the empty part of the strip to move the window.
• Ask Nightjar at the end of the tab strip opens the AI panel.
• The Nightjar ▼ button lists every open tab with its full title and
  address, with a search box (Ctrl+Shift+A) and a ✕ on each tab.
• The ⋮ menu, the notice bar and Find on page (now with a match count and
  next/previous) are part of the toolbar.
• The AI panel's header is one row, with a new-chat button.

Ads and pop-ups

• Blocked ad frames and images no longer leave blank space.
• Sites that ask you to "disable your ad blocker" (Fox News, for one) no
  longer do. The more aggressive hiding that set them off is now an option:
  Hide more ad space (aggressive).
• Pop-ups can be allowed or blocked per site, and Nightjar remembers it.
  Allowing opens the pop-up that was just stopped.
• Pop-ups nobody clicked for are blocked -- that check never actually ran
  before.

Speed and memory

• Opening many tabs quickly no longer freezes the window (30 tabs: 33 s of
  freezing before, under a second now), and startup is a second quicker.
• Background tabs free more memory: frozen at once when memory runs short,
  and unloaded after 30 minutes unseen -- 50 tabs settle at 633 MB instead of
  1,070 MB. Tabs restored at startup load only when you click them.

Also

• A model served by Ollama or LM Studio is named properly in the picker,
  e.g. "qwen2.5:1.5b (Ollama)".
• The expanded AI panel lists your ten most recent chats, with Show more.

---

Test build. Two downloads below — the .zip is Windows, the .dmg is macOS.

Windows

Nobody has launched this yet. CI builds it, packages it and checks the
version resource, which is not the same as it working. If you try it, tell me
what happens either way — that is the single most useful thing a Windows
tester can do right now.

Installing

1. Unzip NightjarBrowser-<version>-windows.zip into a new, empty folder —
   Desktop, Downloads, a USB stick, anywhere. The zip has no folder of its own
   inside it, so extracting it straight into Downloads scatters a thousand
   files there. There is no installer and nothing is written outside the
   folder you choose.
2. Run START-HERE.bat, not the .exe.

START-HERE.bat clears the "downloaded from the internet" mark that Windows
puts on every file inside a downloaded zip, and then starts the browser. That
mark is what makes Windows refuse to run an unsigned build — it is the same
job xattr -dr does on macOS. It changes no setting and disables nothing; it
clears one attribute on the files in that folder. Running it after extracting
is the point: the order cannot be got wrong that way.

If Windows blocks it anyway

Windows protected your PC — Microsoft Defender SmartScreen prevented an
unrecognised app from starting.

Click More info, then Run anyway. That is what an unsigned application
looks like, not a sign that anything is wrong. An antivirus quarantining it
has the same cause.

An Application Control policy has blocked this file

This one is Smart App Control, which is stricter than SmartScreen: no "run
anyway", no per-app exception. Please do not turn it off — it cannot be
re-enabled without resetting Windows. Tell me instead and we will find another
way. In practice this build is only testable where Smart App Control is
already off, which includes any machine upgraded from Windows 10. It stops
being a problem once the build is signed with an Authenticode certificate.

What you need

• Windows 10 (version 1903 or newer) or Windows 11, 64-bit.
• .NET Framework 4.7.2+ and the WebView2 runtime — both standard on Windows 10
  1903 and later, so almost certainly already present.
• 4 GB of memory minimum, 16 GB recommended.
• 2 GB of free disk minimum, 10 GB comfortable — the app is small, the model
  is not.
• A graphics card is strongly recommended but not required. CPU-only works,
  and a small model at ~25 tok/s is faster than most people read; a 7B model
  on CPU takes over a minute per answer.

First run

The browser works immediately. The AI panel asks which model to download —
1–9 GB depending on which, kept on your machine, once. The Models tab
hides the models that will not run on your hardware and warns about the ones
that will run badly.

The inference runtime is already inside the download, so there is nothing
further to fetch beyond the model itself.

macOS

Apple Silicon only, and read the next section before installing.

You need macOS 26 or newer

The bundled inference engine (llama-server and the ggml Metal library) is
built with a minimum of macOS 26.0 — checked with otool, not assumed. On
anything older the browser installs and browses normally and then fails the
first time you ask it a question, which is a confusing place to find out.

This build is not signed with an Apple Developer ID

macOS will refuse to open it the first time and will say it is damaged or from
an unidentified developer. It is neither — it is unsigned.

Installing

1. Open the .dmg and drag NightjarBrowser into Applications.
2. In Terminal, run: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/NightjarBrowser.app
3. Open it. If macOS still blocks it, go to System Settings → Privacy &
   Security, find the message about NightjarBrowser, and click Open Anyway.

First run

It asks which model to download. Start with Gemma 4 E2B — 3.2 GB, works on
8 GB of memory. The download happens once and is kept on your Mac. Nothing
works until it finishes.

What else you need

• Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or later). Intel is not supported: no unified memory
  and no Apple Silicon GPU, so the model would run on CPU at single-digit
  tokens per second.
• 8 GB of memory minimum, 16 GB comfortable.
• About 4 GB of disk: ~110 MB for the app, the rest for the model.

Known, in every build so far

• Unsigned on both platforms, which is what the steps above are working
  around: ad-hoc signed on macOS, no Authenticode certificate on Windows.
• The app does not update itself and never checks on its own. "Check for
  updates…" in the ⋮ menu asks whether a newer release exists and sends you
  here; installing is manual.
• Nothing is uploaded. Crash reports are composed as an email you send
  yourself, and exclude your history, page content and chat.

Nightjar Browser 0.2.9

Test build. Two downloads below — the .zip is Windows, the .dmg is macOS.

Windows

Nobody has launched this yet. CI builds it, packages it and checks the
version resource, which is not the same as it working. If you try it, tell me
what happens either way — that is the single most useful thing a Windows
tester can do right now.

Installing

1. Unzip NightjarBrowser-<version>-windows.zip into a new, empty folder —
   Desktop, Downloads, a USB stick, anywhere. The zip has no folder of its own
   inside it, so extracting it straight into Downloads scatters a thousand
   files there. There is no installer and nothing is written outside the
   folder you choose.
2. Run START-HERE.bat, not the .exe.

START-HERE.bat clears the "downloaded from the internet" mark that Windows
puts on every file inside a downloaded zip, and then starts the browser. That
mark is what makes Windows refuse to run an unsigned build — it is the same
job xattr -dr does on macOS. It changes no setting and disables nothing; it
clears one attribute on the files in that folder. Running it after extracting
is the point: the order cannot be got wrong that way.

If Windows blocks it anyway

Windows protected your PC — Microsoft Defender SmartScreen prevented an
unrecognised app from starting.

Click More info, then Run anyway. That is what an unsigned application
looks like, not a sign that anything is wrong. An antivirus quarantining it
has the same cause.

An Application Control policy has blocked this file

This one is Smart App Control, which is stricter than SmartScreen: no "run
anyway", no per-app exception. Please do not turn it off — it cannot be
re-enabled without resetting Windows. Tell me instead and we will find another
way. In practice this build is only testable where Smart App Control is
already off, which includes any machine upgraded from Windows 10. It stops
being a problem once the build is signed with an Authenticode certificate.

What you need

• Windows 10 (version 1903 or newer) or Windows 11, 64-bit.
• .NET Framework 4.7.2+ and the WebView2 runtime — both standard on Windows 10
  1903 and later, so almost certainly already present.
• 4 GB of memory minimum, 16 GB recommended.
• 2 GB of free disk minimum, 10 GB comfortable — the app is small, the model
  is not.
• A graphics card is strongly recommended but not required. CPU-only works,
  and a small model at ~25 tok/s is faster than most people read; a 7B model
  on CPU takes over a minute per answer.

First run

The browser works immediately. The AI panel asks which model to download —
1–9 GB depending on which, kept on your machine, once. The Models tab
hides the models that will not run on your hardware and warns about the ones
that will run badly.

The inference runtime is already inside the download, so there is nothing
further to fetch beyond the model itself.

macOS

Apple Silicon only, and read the next section before installing.

You need macOS 26 or newer

The bundled inference engine (llama-server and the ggml Metal library) is
built with a minimum of macOS 26.0 — checked with otool, not assumed. On
anything older the browser installs and browses normally and then fails the
first time you ask it a question, which is a confusing place to find out.

This build is not signed with an Apple Developer ID

macOS will refuse to open it the first time and will say it is damaged or from
an unidentified developer. It is neither — it is unsigned.

Installing

1. Open the .dmg and drag NightjarBrowser into Applications.
2. In Terminal, run: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/NightjarBrowser.app
3. Open it. If macOS still blocks it, go to System Settings → Privacy &
   Security, find the message about NightjarBrowser, and click Open Anyway.

First run

It asks which model to download. Start with Gemma 4 E2B — 3.2 GB, works on
8 GB of memory. The download happens once and is kept on your Mac. Nothing
works until it finishes.

What else you need

• Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or later). Intel is not supported: no unified memory
  and no Apple Silicon GPU, so the model would run on CPU at single-digit
  tokens per second.
• 8 GB of memory minimum, 16 GB comfortable.
• About 4 GB of disk: ~110 MB for the app, the rest for the model.

Known, in every build so far

• Unsigned on both platforms, which is what the steps above are working
  around: ad-hoc signed on macOS, no Authenticode certificate on Windows.
• The app does not update itself and never checks on its own. "Check for
  updates…" in the ⋮ menu asks whether a newer release exists and sends you
  here; installing is manual.
• Nothing is uploaded. Crash reports are composed as an email you send
  yourself, and exclude your history, page content and chat.