Getting started
Everything on the shelf runs on your own machine. Your work, your files and your browser profile never leave it.
A paid tool asks for your Pioneering account once, when you first open it, and then checks about once a day that the subscription is still current. That check is cached with a week of grace, so nothing here depends on our server being up.
What is here#
| Tool | Kind | What it does | State |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pioneering Hub | delivery | Installs and updates everything below. The only file you download from us, and it needs no account. | Released |
| Perch | app | Substitutes what a website receives when it records your screen | Released |
| Anti-Blur | extension | Stops sites pausing, dimming or watching for the moment you look away | Released |
| Sodium | extension | Pre-fetches what you are about to open, and blocks trackers at the network layer | Released |
| Argon | extension | Stops sites recognising you between visits without a cookie, by substituting what they fingerprint | Early |
| Typeswap | extension | Your own fonts on any site, including ones whose CSP blocks other font extensions | Released |
The Kind column is doing real work. The Hub is not another tool sitting beside these — it is how they arrive, and it is the only one you fetch yourself.
What Perch actually does#
When a site asks to record your screen, the browser shows you a picker. Perch sits between that picker and the site: the site is handed one tab — the tab that asked — while being told it received the entire screen.
So a call, a demo or a support session sees a full, plausible screen that happens to contain only what you chose to put in it. Nothing else on your desktop is transmitted, because nothing else was ever captured.
Not a proctor
This sentence used to name an exam proctor among the examples, and it should not have: defeating an assessment you agreed to sit under observation is the use the Terms single out and prohibit. A capability that can be misused is worth being exact about, and the exactness has to start with not advertising the misuse.
The mirror is the other half. A shared window has to stay on screen to keep producing frames, which normally means you cannot work in front of it. The mirror is a second, always-on-top window showing the same page, so you can bury the real one and carry on.
What you need#
- Google Chrome. Perch launches its own copy with its own profile; it never touches the Chrome you already have.
- macOS 13+ or Windows 11.
- Around 300 MB of disk.
There is no runtime to install on either platform. The Windows build ships self-contained, and the macOS build is a normal app bundle.
The shortest path#
- Download the build for your platform.
- Run the installer. It is per-user and never asks for an administrator.
- Open the app and press Set Up Everything.
That last step is the whole of setup. It registers the browser bridge, starts the browser Perch drives, and waits for the two halves to find each other.
There is nothing to grant on Windows
Windows has no screen-recording permission to ask for. macOS does, and Perch prompts for it the first time you start a mirror. On Windows the correct number of prompts is zero.
Where to go next#
- Installing — what lands where, on each platform
- How it works — the substitution, in detail
- The mirror — working while a window is shared
- Limits — what it deliberately cannot do