Velnode/ Docs / Featuresv2.3.3-beta.15
Velnode Browser · a product of Dignity New Zealand Limited
Product | Version 1.7 | Last updated 2026-07-03
Document type: Product Owner: Dignity New Zealand Limited Applies to: Velnode Browser v2.3.2-beta.1 and later Last updated: 2026-07-03 Document version: 1.7 Status: Approved
Velnode is an AI-enhanced desktop browser built on Electron. It is designed to be lightweight, local-first, and brand-coherent — a productivity canvas rather than another tab manager. Velnode v2.3.2-beta.1 is the first public beta, released 2026-07-03 for Windows 10/11 (64-bit); macOS and Linux builds are planned. This document inventories the features shipped as of the beta and flags which features are in active development or planned in the public roadmap.
A short tagline: Where intelligence meets simplicity.
Beta status. Velnode is in public beta. Download the Windows installer (~185 MB) at velnode.app/download; it is digitally signed by DIGNITY NEWZEALAND LIMITED (since v2.3.3-beta.13). Windows SmartScreen may still show a caution screen while reputation for the newly signed publisher builds — confirm the publisher name, then More info → Run anyway. Published SHA-256 checksums are at downloads.velnode.app/latest/SHA256SUMS.txt so you can verify the file you downloaded. Updates download inside the app, are byte-verified against the release feed's checksum before anything runs, and install only when you click Restart to apply.
| Pillar | What it means in Velnode |
|---|---|
| Local-first | State lives in data/*.json on your device. An optional account adds login and encrypted sync; creating one is never required. No telemetry. |
| One AI identity | A single assistant — Vee — across summarisation, voice, suggestions, and modal answers. |
| Lightweight by default | ≤ 200 MB installer, ≤ 500 MB idle RAM. Local LLM and wake-word are opt-in downloads. |
| Privacy by architecture | Local-Only mode and Kids Mode are enforced in the main process, not the renderer. |
| Plugin-extensible | A Modular Runtime Core lets official plugins extend behaviour without bloating the core install. |
A single input that doubles as the address bar and the entry point to Vee. Type a URL to navigate, type a question to ask Vee, or use a prefix to run a structured command (note:, summarize, pin, focus mode, and others — see Keyboard Shortcuts).
Tabs are automatically grouped by host as you open them, with a visible group header and a favicon for fast recognition. You can rename, collapse, or break a group at any time. Group state is persisted to data/settings.json.
A vertical tab sidebar that hides itself out of the way until you hover the left edge of the window. Designed for users who like a list of tabs without losing screen real estate.
Attach a sticky note to a tab or to a URL. Notes follow the tab as you move around and are saved in data/notes.json. Sticky notes can be promoted to the persistent Sticky Memory page (a board of all your stickies across the entire browser).
PDF viewer and Markdown viewer are first-class browser surfaces, not popups. Open a .pdf or .md file as a tab the same way you'd open a website.
Velnode provides Chrome/Brave-style context menus across every interactive surface.
A configurable blocked-list page that intercepts navigation to sites you have asked Velnode to block. Useful for focus work, parental supervision, or simply to break a habit.
Vee is the single AI identity in Velnode. There is no second chatbot, no "AskVee" companion, no model picker that pretends to be a different personality. Vee speaks with one voice in summaries, voice replies, the modal answer panel, and the suggestion strip.
Highlight a passage or ask "summarise this page". Vee returns a structured summary calibrated to the article's length and the reading mode you have configured.
Open the Vee modal at any time. Vee carries forward the recent conversation turns up to the configured token cap and answers in the same voice you'd expect from the summariser.
Press the voice key or use the wake-word (opt-in download) to speak to Vee. Vee transcribes locally where possible, applies the same policy layer that governs typed prompts, and responds in voice or text per your preference.
Lightweight suggestion strips inside pages and tabs that surface Vee actions in context — for example, "summarise this thread" on a long article, or "open this in a new tab group" on a hub page.
EchoVee is the local memory layer that lets Vee recall what you and Vee talked about earlier today, this week, or this month. EchoVee is rebuilt deterministically from the append-only timeline.json. You can clear it at any time.
Every Vee request — typed or spoken, in any surface — passes through the policy layer in the main process. The policy layer enforces:
There is no Velnode server. There is no Velnode user account. State lives in data/*.json files on your device. See the Privacy Policy.
data/timeline.json is the canonical record of what happened in Velnode. It is append-only: Velnode never edits or removes a prior entry. If you want to clear it, you delete the file from your file manager.
Every AI call routes through one gateway in the main process. Renderer code does not talk to AI providers directly. This means policy decisions cannot be bypassed by a malicious page or a misbehaving plugin.
Browser fingerprinting is the practice of combining hardware and software signals — canvas rendering, GPU details, font availability, and others — to build a stable identifier for your browser without using cookies. Velnode ships a Fingerprint Protection engine that targets the highest-entropy vectors while being honest about what it does and does not cover.
How it works:
What is protected:
| Vector | Protection |
|---|---|
| Canvas rendering | Per-origin noise applied to pixel read-back via the farble engine. Renders appear identical to the eye but produce a different fingerprint hash each session, unlinking you across visits. |
| WebGL rendered image | Per-origin noise on readPixels read-back. The rendered-image fingerprint is session-unlinkable. |
| GPU identity | A shared common GPU cohort replaces the real UNMASKED_VENDOR and UNMASKED_RENDERER strings, hiding the specific GPU model. |
| Audio context | Per-origin noise on the audio processing graph, preventing audio-fingerprinting techniques. |
| Font enumeration (API-based) | The queryLocalFonts() and document.fonts.check() APIs return a cohorted font set rather than your actual installed fonts. |
| User-Agent and client hints | On protected guest pages, Velnode presents one clean common Chrome identity — User-Agent, Sec-CH-UA, and navigator.userAgentData — rather than the Velnode/Electron string. Your own account-related calls (to Velnode's own servers) are never touched. |
Honest residuals — what Fingerprint Protection does not cover:
| Residual vector | Status |
|---|---|
| WebGL capability parameters (max texture size, extension list, precision values) | Not cohorted in this release. These parameters are hardware-specific and vary by GPU; cohortion without breaking pages requires a broader compatibility study. The rendered-image vector (the highest-entropy WebGL fingerprint) is covered. |
Metric-based font enumeration (measuring text width via measureText or offsetWidth) |
Not spoofed. Altering these metrics would break page layout and is not feasible without a display server–level shim. API-based enumeration is covered. |
This posture is consistent with what privacy-focused browsers such as Brave ship today. Fingerprint Protection reduces fingerprinting entropy and unlinks the rendered-image vector across sessions. It is not full anonymity, and it is not represented as such.
nodeIntegration: false, contextIsolation: true, sandbox: true for every webContents. The renderer→main IPC is exposed only via an explicit allow-list in preload.js. New permissions ship denied by default.
Velnode includes a built-in Password Vault for storing passwords, payment cards, and login credentials. The vault uses two layers of encryption:
A 24-word recovery phrase (BIP39 format) can be set up at any time. Either the master passphrase or the recovery phrase can unlock the vault. The recovery phrase is shown once during setup, alongside a printable PDF Emergency Kit. If both the passphrase and the recovery phrase are lost, the vault is unrecoverable by design — there is no server-side backdoor.
The "Backup" export produces a portable .velora-vault file that can be restored on any computer running Velnode. The file is fully encrypted and can be decrypted with the master passphrase, or with the recovery phrase if the user opted in at export time. Restoring replaces the vault on the destination computer.
An opt-in setting saves encrypted snapshots to a folder of your choice on every vault change, retaining the last N snapshots (default 5). Snapshots are for local rollback; the portable export is the correct route for moving to a new computer.
Velnode can import the passwords a user has exported from another browser. Supported source browsers: Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, and Firefox. The design deliberately avoids reading another browser's encrypted password database directly — instead, the user exports a CSV file through the source browser's own interface (which triggers that browser's OS authentication prompt), then selects the file inside Velnode. This approach is consistent with the protections that modern browsers' App-Bound Encryption is designed to enforce and means Velnode requires no privileged system access.
The import flow works as follows:
Imported credentials are stored in the encrypted vault and governed by the same local-first, never-transmitted posture as any vault entry.
The vault is entirely local and offline. No passwords, card numbers, credentials, or vault keys are transmitted to any server. See the Vault Recovery and Backup user guide for step-by-step instructions.
Velnode offers an optional, free email/password account at velora://account. Creating an account is never required to use any core feature of Velnode.
An account delivers:
Velnode Pro is not yet launched. Pro is planned as a paid, optional tier (hosted Vee AI, a higher sync quota, priority support). It is shown as "coming soon" with a notify-me option in-app; cloud sync itself is free for everyone today, with or without Pro. See Account, Sync & Pro.
See Velnode Account for setup steps and Privacy Policy §4.8 for what is stored server-side.
Velnode has no venture-capital backing and no ad-driven revenue model. Development is funded by donations at velnode.app/donate — one-time or monthly via Ko-fi, direct card via Stripe, or Givealittle for New Zealand donors. Velnode is free forever regardless of whether you donate; a donation is a gift, not a purchase, and carries no special access. A donor "Supporter badge" is planned for a future release and is not available yet.
Velnode competes against Chrome, Brave, and Edge on the desktops of students, public-sector staff, and ordinary people. To win there, Velnode is built to stay light:
Heavy components — the optional local LLM brain, the wake-word model, plugins larger than 5 MB — are downloaded on first opt-in, not shipped in the installer. The Velnode System Health panel in Settings shows live RAM and disk usage so you can see the cost of what you have enabled.
Plugins extend Velnode's behaviour without bloating the core. The plugin runtime is lazy by design: a plugin you have not enabled occupies no RAM at boot. Plugins ship disabled by default; enabling one is an explicit user action in Settings → Plugins.
The Modular Runtime Core enforces per-plugin RAM budgets and will cold-restart a plugin that exceeds its budget. Plugins can be inspected and disabled at any time.
The official Plugin Manager (Phase 8) is the trusted distribution surface. See the Acceptable Use Policy §4 for the obligations every plugin carries.
A reverse-chronological view of what you did and what Vee did with you. Backed by timeline.json. Filter by tab, by host, by Vee interaction, or by note creation.
A persistent board view of all your sticky notes from every tab and URL, with simple drag, group, and search.
An on-device mindmap surface saved to mindmap.json. Useful for collecting your thinking on a topic that spans many tabs.
A configurable home view that pulls in your bookmarks, recent timeline, pinned Vee commands, and link to the project repository.
A full bookmark system across four integrated surfaces, all backed by one flat-preserving data model. The model keeps bookmarks in a flat list with folder nesting and ordering held alongside it, so legacy features that read the flat list continue to work without modification.
| Surface | How to open |
|---|---|
| Favorites bar | ☰ → Bookmarks → "Show favorites bar" (off by default). A toggleable strip under the toolbar. Folders appear as dropdowns; overflow items collapse into a » button; drag to reorder or move items between folders. |
| Favorites flyout | 📘 toolbar button, or Ctrl+Shift+O, or ☰ → Bookmarks → "★ Favorites manager". A right-side panel with a folder tree, search, add-folder, and drag-to-move. Includes a link to the full manager. |
| Star in the omnibox | The ★ inside the address bar. Click it or press Ctrl+D to open an add/edit popover (name + folder). Editing a bookmark keeps it in its current folder. |
| Full page | velora://bookmarks. A two-pane manager: folder tree on the left, favicon cards on the right. Supports search, drag-and-drop between folders, inline folder create/rename/delete, a bookmark Add composer, and Import/Export. |
The unified ☰ Bookmarks menu group provides quick access to all four surfaces in one place: ★ Favorites manager, ☆ Add this page, ▭ Show favorites bar (with a live check mark), ⬆ Import, and ⬇ Export.
Import / Export uses the standard Netscape bookmark HTML format, compatible with Chrome, Edge, and Firefox. On import, only http://, https://, and file:// links are accepted; any other scheme is skipped.
Direct browser import (Settings → "Import from another browser", or the "From browser" button in the full manager) reads bookmarks and browsing history directly from Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, or Vivaldi installed on your device — no export file required. History import is handled by an on-device, dependency-free pure-JS SQLite reader; nothing leaves your device.
Privacy: bookmarks are stored on your device in data/bookmarks.json and data/bookmark-tree.json. Favicons are served from Velnode's own local favicon cache — no external favicon service is contacted.
| Phase | Status | What ships in it |
|---|---|---|
| 1–7 | Complete | Browser core, voice, unified AI gateway, Kids Mode policy layer. |
| 8–14 | Complete | Plugin platform (Veehive store), password vault, opt-in end-to-end encrypted Velnode-to-Velnode sync, AI search, local-LLM opt-in brain, design-token system. |
| 19–20 | Complete | Top title-bar + Vee's Daily Whisper; pre-launch hardening pass. |
| 21 Stage 1 | Complete | Optional Velnode Account: email/password sign-up/sign-in, split-password KDF, BIP-39 Recovery Kit, Cloudflare Workers + D1 backend. |
| 21 Stage 2 | Complete | Cross-device sync of all data types (bookmarks, history, notes, workspaces, pins, settings, vault) under the account data key. Free for every account, 250 MB storage. |
| 21 Stage 3 | Planned | Velnode Pro subscription + Stripe billing; hosted Vee AI (opt-in). Not yet launched — "coming soon" in-app. |
| First public beta | Complete | v2.3.2-beta.1, released 2026-07-03 for Windows 10/11 x64. Unsigned installer (SmartScreen warning expected); notify-only updates until code signing lands. macOS and Linux are planned. |
Latest shipped release: v2.3.2-beta.1 (first public beta — Windows download, checksums, notify-only update checks, and donation-funded independence messaging alongside the v2.3.0/v2.3.1 fingerprint-protection and account-sync work).
Document maintained by Dignity New Zealand Limited. Questions: [email protected].