User guide
The browser panel
The right-hand half of the window is a real browser, and the chat is looking at it. This is how to work in it, and what a site can be allowed to do.
The right-hand half of the window is a browser. Not a preview, not a screenshot — a real one, with tabs, history, bookmarks and saved passwords, which the assistant can see and, with your permission, act on.
That is the arrangement the whole product rests on: you are signed in to your own applications, in your own session, and the assistant works them from inside it. Nothing is migrated and there is no second login.
Showing and hiding it
The globe control in the chat header toggles the panel, and its tooltip says which of the two the next click will do. View ▸ Show/Hide Web Browser does the same thing from the menu bar.
Tabs belong to a chat, not to the window
This is the single most useful fact in this article. The tabs in the panel belong to the conversation you are in. Start a New chat and it shares them; start a new chat group and it gets its own.
So “the assistant says it cannot see the site” almost always means the site is open in a different conversation. Chats and context goes into how that works and why it is arranged that way.
The toolbar
Back, forward, reload and an address field, as you would expect. Then three controls that are XataWorks rather than browsing:
- The bookmark star, reading Bookmark this page or Remove bookmark depending on where you are.
- The page-tools control, which is hidden until the tab you are looking at offers the assistant at least one operation and then shows how many. Its tooltip counts them in words — … page tools available — click to view — and clicking opens the list.
- The permission shield, which is what this article is really about.
The two site permissions
There are exactly two, and they are deliberately coarse. Not one per operation — a site publishes dozens whose names mean nothing out of context, and the set changes whenever the site ships. The question you actually answer is is this a site I let an agent act on at all, and it is answered once per site.
| Permission | What it lets the agent do |
|---|---|
| Read this page | Read this page’s text and whatever you have selected in it. |
| Use this site’s page tools | See and call the tools this website publishes to it. |
They are separate on purpose. Letting the assistant read a page is not the same decision as letting it act there, and granting one never grants the other.
The shield in the browser toolbar is where they are turned on and off for the site in the current tab. It is muted when nothing is granted and tinted when something is, and its tooltip names the site, what is granted, and the scope the grant applies to.
The shield is not always there, and its absence means something. It is hidden on any page nothing can be granted for — a blank tab, or a page the application serves itself. If you are looking for it on an ordinary website and it is missing, check the address field: you are probably not on one.
What a grant means once it exists — how far it reaches, and how to take it back — is Approvals and permissions.
Bookmarks, finding and passwords
The star saves the page you are on. A find control searches the page you are looking at — Find in page, the way it works in any browser.
Browser passwords are stored only if you ask for them to be. The Passwords section of Preferences is where saved ones are managed, and a stored password is never shown back to you as a value — see Your data.
The Browser section of Preferences carries the rest, including which pages a new chat’s browser opens with. Set none and a new chat’s browser opens empty.
Back to all user-guide articles.