Limits

Everything on this page is a limit Perch will not work around. Most of them exist to protect the person whose screen it is, and working with them has produced a better design than working around them would have.

The sharing bar cannot be hidden#

When a tab is captured, the browser shows its own sharing indicator. It is not part of the page, not part of any extension surface, and there is no flag, no policy and no protocol method that removes it.

That is correct behaviour. An indicator an application could suppress would be worth nothing — the entire point is that it sits outside the control of whatever is doing the capturing.

Perch does not try. The mirror is a separate window precisely so the thing you work in is not the thing wearing the banner.

A captured tab will not go fullscreen#

Ask a tab that is being captured to enter fullscreen and it will refuse. Also deliberate: a page that could fill the screen the instant it began being captured is a phishing primitive.

The mirror handles fullscreen on its own window, which is a different window and under no such restriction.

A minimised window cannot be mirrored (Windows)#

A minimised window has no compositor surface, so there is nothing to capture. macOS has no equivalent restriction.

This is a platform limit, not a bug, and the app says so rather than showing a frozen frame and hoping you do not notice.

It cannot attach to your existing browser#

A browser only lets an application add an extension to a session that application started. Perch launches its own, and there is no supported path to the Chrome you already have open.

Anything that claims to inject into your everyday browser is doing something you should think carefully about.

Update verification is weaker on Windows#

The macOS build verifies an update carries the same code signature as the running copy. Windows has no equivalent without a paid certificate, so updates there are verified by SHA-256 against the hash published with the release, over HTTPS.

That is real verification and it is weaker than the Mac's. It is written down here rather than glossed over, and it fails closed: a release with no published hash is refused rather than trusted.

It does not hide that you are sharing#

Perch changes what is shared, never whether the other side can tell sharing is happening. The indicator stays, the browser's own UI stays, and the site still knows it has a stream. If you need the other side to believe nothing is being captured, this is the wrong tool and no tool should do that.