Browser & widgets

The browser panel embeds a real web view, so you can keep documentation, a live preview or a dashboard pinned next to your work. It opens web pages and local file:// paths, with back, forward and reload in the address bar. The ⋯ menu holds the occasional actions: find on the page, zoom (its − and + keep the menu open, so you can press them again), a screenshot that drops a draggable thumbnail you can pull onto the canvas, and recording the page.

• Browser panels in the same profile share their sign-ins, so a sign-in made in one panel is shared by the others. Cookies and storage persist across restarts. To be signed in to two accounts on the same site, put the panels in different profiles (see below).
• Playback pauses automatically when a panel scrolls out of view, to save CPU and bandwidth. Pausing is all that happens: the page itself keeps running.
• A browser panel never reloads behind your back. Scroll it off the canvas, switch to another worktree, switch to another project entirely, and the page is exactly where you left it when you come back: the same scroll position, the same half-typed form, the same signed-in dashboard. Only closing the panel ends it.
• Known media hosts (YouTube, Twitch, SoundCloud and similar) render edge-to-edge with no address bar so the content fills the panel.
• A YouTube link added from the Panel Library, on the YouTube card or as Embed on an address typed into its search, opens the player itself, not the watch page: no masthead, no comments, no sidebar of suggestions. Paste a video, a short, a live stream, a playlist or a bare video id; a link with a timestamp starts where it points, and a video opened from inside a playlist keeps the playlist. Anything without a player behind it, a channel or a search, still opens as the page it is. If the uploader has blocked embedding, the panel falls back to the watch page on its own.

The panel starts with an empty cookie jar, so sites you are signed in to elsewhere do not know you here, and some sign-in pages refuse the session outright. The first browser panels you open say so with a card over the page. Choose a browser lists the browsers on this computer that have saved sign-ins (Chrome, Edge, Arc, Brave, Comet, Helium, Firefox and Safari, one row per profile when a browser has several), and a JSON export works too. Pick one and its cookies are copied into the panel’s profile, so the sites you use open signed in, for you and for Dex. Everything is read on your machine; nothing is uploaded. On a Mac, importing from a Chromium browser makes macOS ask for your login password first, and the card says so before the prompt appears.

On Windows, Chrome, Edge and Brave keep their cookies locked while they are open, so quit the browser completely (including from the system tray) before importing. From version 127, Chrome also seals its cookies with app-bound encryption that no other app can read, and the card says so instead of asking you to try again. For those sites, sign in inside the panel, or import from Firefox or a JSON export.

Not now answers for the panel in front of you, and the next panel asks again, up to three times. Don’t ask again ends it for good, and so does importing. Any time later, Import sign-ins into… in the profile menu opens the same list. If any cookies could not be read, the panel says how many rather than reporting a clean import.

Profiles

A profile is a set of sign-ins of its own. The person button in the address bar, left of ⋯, says which profile the page is in and opens the profile menu. Every panel starts in Personal; once there is a second profile, the button shows the profile’s letter in its color, so two panels on the same site read apart at a glance.

• New profile… asks for a name, moves the panel into the new profile and opens its sign-in list: import another browser profile into it (your work Chrome, say), or press Start empty and sign in inside the panel.
• Pick another profile in the menu to move the panel there. The page opens again at the same address, signed in as that profile.
• Import sign-ins into… replaces the cookies of the profile you are in and leaves the other profiles alone.
• A link a page opens in a new tab stays in that page’s profile, and a new browser opens in the profile its project used last. Pages Dex and coding agents open start in Personal.
• Manage profiles… renames profiles, Personal included, and deletes any profile but Personal. Deleting one removes its sign-ins and site data from this computer, and its panels open again in Personal.

To show Dex part of a page, press the crosshair in the address bar and click the element. The panel outlines what is under the pointer and names it as you move; Esc cancels. The element lands on a small card with its selector and a note field, and Ask Dex about this opens Dex with the panel mentioned and the element written out. Dex also receives the selector, the React component when the page exposes one, and a snippet of the HTML. Coding agents read the same picks through the preview tools, so the card keeps them until you clear it.

Local dev-server links printed in a terminal can open straight into a browser panel; see the terminal link routing for how that works. A supervised agent can also drive a browser panel to check its own frontend work.

The document panel previews PDFs, Word documents (.docx), images (PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, SVG and more) and videos (MP4, MOV, WebM and more) right on the canvas. It detects the file type for you. Local PNG, JPEG, GIF and WebP images up to 10 MB also open from outside your workspace, such as Downloads, when Deska can read them. You do not need to add their folder to the workspace. An image gets the same preview as an editor tab, and Copy image in its footer puts the picture itself on your clipboard, ready to paste into a chat, a design tool or another agent. Right-click the image for Copy Path and Reveal in Finder, or click it and press Cmd/CtrlC. If something cannot be rendered it offers a Reveal in Finder button (Reveal in File Explorer on Windows) so you can get to the file in your file manager. The file path is remembered with your workspace, so documents reopen where you left them.

• Sticky Note: a freeform colored note with rich text (titles, headings, body, monospaced). Pick from five colors. Drag it to a window’s top-right corner to attach it at its own size; one note fits each window. The note’s Attach to window menu offers the same action. Anchor to draws a separate dashed connector to a panel. See Sticky notes on the canvas.
• AI Scratchpad: a quick notepad for a brain-dump, with a live word count and a short excerpt at the top so a long note stays skimmable at a glance.

• Todo: a compact checklist. Type a task and press Enter, click items to complete them, and watch the done/total counter in the header. Items are markdown checkboxes stored in your notes vault, so they outlive the workspace.
• Pomodoro: a focus timer with the classic 25-minute work and 5-minute break rhythm. The countdown keeps running even if you close the panel or switch workspaces, and shows the mode, cycle and a slim progress bar. The same timer sits in the Extras panel in the corner, and its ring and countdown show on the Extras button while a session runs.

A few extras add atmosphere without getting in the way: a small Music player for lofi, a Mood Ring whose color and mood label follow the time of day, and a Brainrot Player for a vertical-video sidekick. Music and Mood Ring render chromeless and stay out of your way until you hover them: settings and a close button fade into the top right corner, and a right-click anywhere on the widget opens the same node menu a titled panel has. The Brainrot Player keeps the normal panel header. Opening Music again brings back the player you already have, since every card drives one player.

A few more small panels are worth knowing about:

• Voice: your voice history, a searchable list of everything you dictated or said to Dex, with Copy and Delete on each entry. It records nothing itself; the catalog is described in Voice.
• Notes: a browser over your note vault, the folder of markdown files that outlives any single panel, so notes survive closing a workspace.
• Action Card: a small panel that runs an ordered list of shell commands one step at a time, so a routine such as lint, test and commit is one click. If a step fails, the remaining steps are skipped. It is not in the Panel Library yet.

Beyond panels, the notebook (Cmd/CtrlJ) slides in from the right for notes you want at hand without giving up canvas space, and the Extras button in the corner keeps a quick note, the timer and the music a click away. See Notes & the notebook for the whole picture.