The browser that takes your side.
The web has become hostile to the person using it.
Paywalls after the click. SEO sludge. Tracking. Autoplay. Cookie theatre. Newsletter ambushes. Affiliate junk dressed as journalism. Interfaces designed by people optimizing against you.
Your browser watches all of this happen and calls it neutrality.
Crank is an opinionated browser built to push back.
It judges what reaches you, removes what gets in the way, and explains everything it did.
Crank is a research project in active development. The judgment engine comes first. The browser comes second. There is no ship date and this page will not pretend otherwise.
Browsers went neutral at exactly the wrong moment.
Most browsers are very good at rendering the web.
That is the problem.
They will faithfully open the useful article, the SEO farm, the surveillance-heavy ad maze, the fake download button, the paywalled result, and the site with three popups before the first paragraph. Identical treatment, every time.
They treat all of it as somebody else's problem.
Crank doesn't.
Because neutrality is not the absence of a side. When one party spent millions optimizing the page and the other party just wants to read it, a neutral browser has already picked a side.
The browser should represent the person using it.
Not the publisher.
Not the advertiser.
Not the search engine.
Not the growth team.
You.
03 — The other direction
Everyone else is building a browser that acts for you. Crank acts for you against the page.
The last two years of browser development have gone one way: agents. Browsers that click, fill, book, buy, and summarize on your behalf. Point it at a website and let it work.
There's a flaw in that plan that the security research keeps finding. If your browser follows instructions it reads on a page, then a hostile page can instruct your browser. That class of attack — a webpage hijacking the assistant sent to read it — has been demonstrated repeatedly against shipping AI browsers through 2026.
So the industry's answer to a hostile web is to send a trusting robot into it, carrying your logins.
Crank starts from the same diagnosis and goes the opposite way.
Crank does not act on websites for you. It stands between you and them.
It doesn't click anything. It doesn't log in anywhere. It doesn't take instructions from pages — it makes judgments about them.
The web doesn't need a more capable assistant walking into hostile buildings on your behalf.
It needs a browser that looks at the door first.
Documented in: Cato Networks' HashJack research on indirect prompt injection against AI browser assistants; the March 2026 agentic-browser vulnerability disclosure; the Cloud Security Alliance's 2026 “Indirect Prompt Injection in the Wild” note; OWASP's findings on prompt injection in agentic AI systems; and Palo Alto Networks Unit 42's in-the-wild observations.
Crank has opinions.
Not every page deserves the same treatment.
Not every website deserves your data, your patience, or your attention. Crank is built to notice the difference.
A newsletter modal over the second paragraph.
That's not content. It goes.
Related-content bait wrapped around the thing you came for.
Crank can tell the article from the machinery around it.
Sixty third-party requests on a recipe page.
Crank treats that as a defect, not as normal.
“1 free article remaining” — on a page with no paywall.
Crank has seen that trick.
A chart, a table, a code block, a citation.
Those stay. Always. Cleaning a page is not the same as emptying it.
A page Crank doesn't understand.
It says so, changes nothing, and gets out of the way.
Why a browser? Why not twelve extensions?
Ad blockers block ads.
Privacy extensions block trackers.
Reader modes clean up articles.
Cookie tools dismiss banners.
All useful. All fixing one symptom each, one page at a time, with no idea the others exist.
Crank is trying to change the whole transaction between you and the web.
From the moment a page starts loading to the moment it settles, one system decides what happens: work out what the page actually is, block what's hostile, keep what's useful, apply your rules rather than the site's, and explain the whole thing afterwards.
That's not a feature. It's a policy connecting all the features — and a policy needs somewhere to live.
An extension lives inside somebody else's browser, using the hooks that browser chooses to expose, and can have those hooks taken away. Ask anyone who built a content blocker before Manifest V3.
There's a second reason, and it's the one that actually forces the decision. If Crank tells you a page is hostile, that warning cannot be something the page can cover, fake, or delete. It has to be drawn somewhere the website can't reach.
That surface belongs to the browser. So Crank is the browser.
You shouldn't need a pile of extensions to make the web tolerable. The browser itself should be on your side.
06 — The core
One page. Two sets of rules. Two different pages.
This is what's being built right now, and it's the part nothing else does.
You give Crank a constitution — your rules about how the web is allowed to treat you. Not a settings screen. A file you can open and read.
Then you switch it depending on what you're doing. Same URL. Same visit. Genuinely different pages — because you asked for different things.
Illustrative example — mocked output, not a live page.
Crank changed this page.
Suppressed: newsletter overlay, 3 inline promos, related-content rail, autoplay video, 14 trackers
Preserved: headline, byline, article body, pull-quote image
Uncertain: none flagged on this pass
Rule fired: reading.suppress-interruptions · Show me the original
1. You can see what changed.
What Crank thought the page was, what it did, and which rule fired. Small changes are summarised rather than listed one by one.
2. You can undo it.
The original is always one action away. Not in a menu.
3. It knows when it doesn't know.
Below a confidence threshold, Crank annotates the page instead of changing it, and says it wasn't sure.
4. It happens on your computer.
No account, no server, no cloud model. The page never leaves your machine.
And when Crank meets something it wasn't built for — a web app, a checkout, your bank — it stops trying, renders the page normally, and says so.
Crank recommends. You decide.
The constraints are the product.
Crank will never bypass a paywall. It will flag the wall. It won't climb it. Publishers get to charge for their work.
Crank will never quietly rewrite what you're reading. No AI summary silently standing in for what the author actually wrote.
Crank will never quietly send your pages anywhere. Judgment runs on your machine. The first build has no cloud tier at all, and protected content — prices, totals, forms, logins, medical and legal text — never leaves your device under any setting.
Crank will never act on a website for you. No autonomous clicking, buying, posting, or form-filling. Crank's job is to stand between you and the page, not to walk into it wearing your name.
Crank will never sell placement. No promoted results, no paid exceptions, no advertiser exclusions. A system whose whole job is judging what deserves your attention cannot have a price list.
Crank will never judge what a site says — only how it treats you. Tracking, dark patterns, manipulation, clutter: fair game. Opinions: not Crank's business.
What Crank believes
01
Your attention belongs to you.
Websites may compete for it. They do not own it.
02
A click is not consent to harassment.
Opening a page should not mean accepting popups, autoplay, tracking, overlays, redirects, and notification prompts.
03
Neutrality is a side.
A browser that treats a hostile page exactly like an honest one has already made a choice.
04
Ranking is not quality.
Popular, optimized, and useful are three different things.
05
Software should sometimes say no.
A good browser does not have to behave like a neutral pipe.
06
Judgment has to show its working.
Anything that changes what you see must be visible, explainable, and reversible.
07
The open web is worth protecting.
Independent sites, weird corners, small publishers, personal pages, and useful obscurities matter.
08
The browser should represent the user.
That is the side Crank is on.
This is a research project. Here's exactly where it is.
Crank is a very small effort, written about in public, and it is early.
The order is deliberate. The judgment engine comes first. Right now that means a frozen set of real pages, an evaluation harness, and a hard question:
Can this thing read and clean a page better than Reader View plus uBlock Origin plus a page-customization tool — and do something none of them can express at all, which is behave differently depending on what you're doing?
Until the answer is yes, the expensive part doesn't get built. No browser work, no Chromium integration, nothing. That's a real gate with real numbers attached, not a figure of speech — and if the numbers come back bad, they get published too.
What that means for you: there's nothing to download and there's no beta. There's an argument, a build log, and eventually a demo — one page, two constitutions, run on a fixed set of captured pages — that will either be convincing or won't be.
If that's the kind of thing you want to watch get built, get on the list.
The web isn't going to fix itself.
No product announcements, because there's no product. Occasional writing about what's being built, what broke, and what the numbers said.
What do you read most? — Technical docs · News & long-form · A bit of everything
Occasional development notes and early-build invitations. No marketing sludge. That would be embarrassing.