How it works
The page you asked for is fetched by a browser in the country you picked, rewritten on its way back, and rendered in your tab. This is each step in between, and what it means for the sites you visit.
The path of one page
Nothing here is magic and none of it runs on your machine. Each step is one thing that happens between the URL you type and the page you get.
Every region runs its own space. Picking one and pressing Browse starts a session inside it: a browser context with its own cookie jar, its own storage and its own history, none of which has been anywhere before you.
Your own browser has still not touched the site at this point. The only request it has made so far is to us.
The session starts with
The session asks for the page from inside the region. The site completes its handshake with a machine there, so the address it records as the visitor belongs to that country rather than to your connection.
Everything a site decides from location, it decides at this moment: which edge answers, which currency and language the page is built in, and if the content is served at all. The handshake is shaped to resemble an ordinary browser, so what comes back is the page a reader in that country would get rather than a stripped version meant for machines.
HTML, CSS and JavaScript are rewritten as they pass back through the session. Links, image sources, stylesheet URLs and fetch calls are remapped so every follow-up request leaves the same way the first one did. Response headers that would refuse to render the page inside a frame are adjusted at the same time.
This is what holds a session together past the first page. Click a link inside it and you are still in the same region under the same protections, rather than quietly landing back on your own connection.
Links in the page
<a href="https://example.com/story"><a href="https://browse.openlibrenet.com/…/story">Headers that refuse framing
X-Frame-Options: DENYadjusted so the page renders in the sessionThe page then runs its own scripts against a browser that gives up very little. The navigator object is masked, canvas readback is blocked, device details such as processor count, memory, display and battery are withheld, and the local clock is hidden. WebRTC is switched off, so there is no candidate address to leak.
Request headers are cut back to a common set: Accept, Accept-Encoding, Accept-Language, User-Agent and the Sec-CH-UA family carry generic values, and headers outside a small list are dropped. Sites that read the canvas or the clock for honest reasons can behave oddly under this. That is the price of it holding against the ones that do not.
What arrives is real HTML and CSS, not a video of a browser somewhere else. Text stays selectable, the layout reflows to your window, and scrolling happens locally. There is no stream to buffer and no resolution to drop on a slow connection.
Cookies the site sets belong to the session rather than to your browser profile. Close it and that browser is destroyed along with everything it picked up, so the next one starts blank again.
Destroyed when the session closes
Exposure
The same request down two paths. On the left is what a site collects from an ordinary tab. On the right is what reaches it through a session.
In a sessionScroll the table sideways for every column
This is about what a website can work out about a visitor it has never met. Signing into an account still tells that account who you are. For the fingerprinting side of it, tested against a real browser, see Anonymous View .
Regions
Six countries to browse from today. The one you pick decides the address a site sees and the edition of the page it builds for you.
A session runs from a single country for its whole life. Browsing from somewhere else means closing it and starting a new one, which is a new browser with nothing carried across.
That restart is useful more often than it is a nuisance. Comparing a price or a catalogue between two markets works properly when the second session has never seen the first one's cookies.
Put the region code and the site straight in the address bar and the session opens on that page, in that country, without a stop on the homepage.
openlibrenet.com/uk/example.comAny of the six codes work in that slot: us, uk, de, fr, nl, hk. Handy for a bookmark, or for handing someone a link that lands them in the right region on the first click. More on what each country is reached for in unblocking websites.
Team browsing
Press Invite, send the link, and whoever opens it lands in the session you are already in. This is what moves between you, and what does not.
Only the changes to what is on screen cross between participants. There is no encoded stream, which is why the page stays sharp on a phone and readable on a large display at the same time.
Your own cookies, saved passwords and tokens stay in your browser. Participants share the session in front of them, not each other’s machines.
Followers interact with the same live page rather than asking for control of a desktop. Nobody installs anything to join, on any device.
Set against a screen share, and what it is worth using for, on team browsing .
Limits
A browser running in another country buys you a lot and costs you a few things. Worth knowing which before you rely on it.
A few sites work hard to detect and refuse rendering anywhere but their own tab. Switching region clears it sometimes. Sometimes the page simply will not load, and no setting on our side changes that.
Webcam, microphone, card reader, printer, a file sitting on your desk. The browser is running in another country and cannot reach any of it.
Log into an account and that account knows exactly who is using it. What the session hides is what an unknown visitor gives away, which is a different question from who you tell the site you are.
Every response is rewritten on the way through, and that costs time. Reading-heavy pages feel close to normal. Busy web applications feel it more.
This holds up well against commercial tracking and geo-fencing. It is not designed to stand between you and an adversary with real resources, and it would be wrong to sell it that way.
A fresh browser every time is the point, and it cuts both ways: no saved logins, no autofill, no reading list. Each session starts from nothing.
Reading about it takes longer than using it. Drop in a URL, pick a country, and watch the five steps run in about a second.
Start browsing