NBrowser

NBrowser 0.3.0 · Windows 10/11 x64

A browser that minds its own business.

Chromium underneath. A tracker shield on top. Tabs, history, bookmarks and find-in-page, plus session restore, a real data wipe, and a command palette on Ctrl+K. No account, no sync, no telemetry, and no auto-updater calling home.

Download installer Portable .exe

Windows 10/11 x64 · v0.3.0

Unsigned build. SHA-256 published. Source archive available. Read the trust notes →

Engine
Electron 33
Chromium 130
Search
DuckDuckGo
or Brave / Startpage / Google
Shield
77,310 hosts
bundled, never downloaded
Telemetry
None
no analytics, no crash pings
NBrowser 0.3.0 running on Windows, showing the tab strip, address bar, tracker shield badge and the NMAIL pricing page
FIG. 01 NBrowser 0.3.0 at 1360×900. The shield badge counts requests blocked on the page you're looking at.

01 / What's inside

Nine things, done properly.

No extensions, no sync, no AI sidebar. Three of these are new in 0.3.0.

  1. 01

    Tracker shield

    77,310 known ad, analytics and malware hosts ship inside the app. Requests are matched locally and cancelled before they leave the machine. The badge counts the blocks; the panel names the hosts.

  2. 02

    Command palette

    Ctrl+K puts every action in one field: new tab, history, downloads, settings, shield, Tor, data wipe. Anything that isn't a command becomes an address or a DuckDuckGo search.

  3. 03

    Session restore

    Close the window with twelve tabs open and they come back on launch. Local http(s) pages only, capped at twelve, with a switch in settings if you'd rather start clean.

  4. 04

    A real wipe

    Clear browsing data wipes history, cookies, storage, cache, auth and the DNS cache, then reloads the page. Bookmarks, settings and the shield allowlist survive. Two clicks, no fake progress.

  5. 05

    Tabs that behave

    Every tab is a sandboxed process. Middle-click closes, Ctrl+1–9 jumps, Ctrl+Tab cycles. Popups open as tabs, and shortcuts pressed in a page are forwarded to the chrome.

  6. 06

    History and bookmarks

    Both live in %APPDATA%\NBrowser\nbrowser-data.json. Search history from the drawer, wipe it with one button. No cloud copy exists.

  7. 07

    Find in page

    Ctrl+F with a live match count, Enter to step forward, Shift+Enter back. The bar doesn't steal the page's focus.

  8. 08

    Downloads you can see

    Progress, byte counts, completed and failed states, and “show in folder”. Files land in your normal Downloads directory. No cloud hand-off.

  9. 09

    Tor when you ask

    One toggle routes the session through socks5://127.0.0.1:9050, DNS included. The button probes the port first and says so when Tor isn't running.

NBrowser 0.3.0's local new-tab page: hexagon mark, clock, DuckDuckGo search box and shortcuts to NMAIL, DuckDuckGo, Tor Check and the Developer API
FIG. 02 The new-tab page is a local file, restyled flat for 0.3.0. It makes no request until you type.

02 / Tracker shield

77,310 hosts. Zero phone-home.

The list comes from StevenBlack/hosts, the long-running MIT-licensed adware and malware list. It is compiled into the app at build time, not fetched from a server. Every request is matched on this machine against exact hostnames and their parent domains, and a match is cancelled before a packet is sent.

The toolbar badge is a per-page count, not a lifetime score. Open it to see which hosts were stopped, how many requests the page made, and the totals for this session and this install. If a site depends on its own analytics endpoint, pause the shield for that site and reload.

Main-frame navigation is never blocked, so a tracker host can't stop you from opening a page. The shield is not a cosmetic ad blocker — placeholders can remain, and unknown or newly created hosts are not filtered until a future build.

List77,310 unique hosts
SourceStevenBlack/hosts · MIT
List date14 November 2026
Matchinglocal · exact + parent
Runtime fetchnone
Pauseper-site allowlist
NBrowser's tracker shield report on NMAIL's pricing page, showing static.cloudflareinsights.com blocked and the session and lifetime counts
FIG. 03 The shield catches Cloudflare's injected analytics on NMAIL's own pricing page. No site is exempt, including ours.

03 / Control

Everything is one keystroke away.

Ctrl+K opens a command palette with the actions you actually repeat. It filters as you type, falls back to a URL or a DuckDuckGo search, and closes with Esc. The same palette can pause the shield, open settings or start the data wipe.

Session restore and the data wipe are intentionally boring: local state, explicit confirmation, and no sync service waiting to resurrect what you deleted.

Ctrl+Shift+Delete jumps directly to the wipe control. Session restore is limited to http(s) tabs and is skipped when the app runs in capture mode.

PaletteCtrl + K
Restorelast 12 http(s) tabs
Wipehistory · cookies · cache · auth · DNS
Kept on wipebookmarks · settings · allowlist
Syncnone
NBrowser's command palette open over the NMAIL pricing page, listing new tab, reload, find, history, downloads, settings and shield commands
FIG. 04 The palette is the whole browser in one input: commands, addresses and searches share the same field.

04 / Tor, honestly

It's a SOCKS5 port, not a vibe.

NBrowser doesn't bundle a Tor daemon and won't pretend to. Flip the toggle and it checks whether something is listening on the standard port. If nothing answers, the button stays off and tells you what to start.

  • Tor Browser with SocksPort 9050 in its torrc
  • Tor Expert Bundle — run tor.exe
  • The Tor system service for Windows

In Tor mode every request and DNS lookup uses the proxy. .onion addresses are blocked until the port is confirmed alive, so a lookup never leaks over plain DNS. Direct mode is a normal HTTPS connection — a VPN is your call.

Proxysocks5://127.0.0.1:9050
DNSthrough the proxy
Onion without Torblocked
WebRTC hw codecsdisabled
Extra windowsdenied
Tor bundledno

05 / Download

Version 0.3.0

Windows 10/11 · x64 · free · no account. Android and iOS are not supported — Electron is a desktop runtime.

Installer

Per-user install, Start-menu and desktop shortcuts, uninstaller included.

NSIS
NBrowser-Setup-0.3.0.exe

Loading build metadata…

Portable

One .exe, no installer. Extracts to a temp folder and runs from a USB stick.

PORTABLE
NBrowser-Portable-0.3.0.exe

Loading build metadata…

Unsigned. No code-signing certificate, so SmartScreen may warn on first run. More info → Run anyway. If you'd rather check first:

certutil -hashfile NBrowser-Setup-0.3.0.exe SHA256

Compare the output with the SHA-256 printed above. No match → delete it and download again. Part files are served in 20 MB chunks and assembled in the browser because Cloudflare caps a single static file at 25 MiB.

06 / How it's built

Boring build, on purpose.

Electron 33.4.11, electron-builder, NSIS and a 4-line PowerShell script that patches the executable metadata with rcedit. The source archive below is the exact tree this build came from — scripts included.

No minifiers on the app code, no remote config, no update channel. The only network requests are the ones you make by browsing.

Download source (.zip) Verification & trust notes

Source archive metadata loads with the manifest.

  1. 0.3.0 Tracker shield with a per-page report and per-site pause, 77,310 bundled hosts. Command palette, session restore, full data wipe, flat new-tab refresh.
  2. 0.2.0 Tabs, persistent history and bookmarks, find bar, downloads drawer, new-tab page, Tor routing, shortcut forwarding.
  3. 0.1.x Single-window prototype. Kept only as a version number in the changelog.

Get it, check it, delete it if you don't like it.

The installer is about 82 MB. The uninstaller removes the app; your data folder is yours to keep or delete.

Download 0.3.0 Trust notes