First run

Setup starts and finishes in one tab. When you install Retrace, the extension opens its own dark setup tab and walks you through it — you do not have to go looking for anything. This page describes that walk, and then the first two things worth doing once it is done: finding a page you read, and asking a question about it.

If you haven't installed yet, start at Install.

The setup walk

Four screens, in one tab, in this order. Two optional detours sit inside the fourth. Every screen writes down where you are, so if you close the tab — or Chrome restarts the extension underneath you — reopening setup lands you back on the screen you left, not at the top.

Until setup is finished, clicking the Retrace icon in your toolbar reopens the setup tab. Once it's finished, that same click toggles the rail instead.

What you read, remembered on this Mac.

Nothing has been read yet. This screen states what Retrace will remember, how much disk the Ask model needs (7.2 GB, downloaded once in the background, needs 8.2 GB free), and asks you to agree. Nothing is remembered until you sign in — clicking through this screen records your agreement and the model request, and remembers no browsing at all.

This screen and the next one each have a not now door. Taking it withdraws the model request, throws away anything staged, and — because nothing is remembered before you sign in — leaves setup with zero pages remembered.

2. Account

Sign in with Google or email. This is the moment remembering turns on — not when setup finishes. Signing in flips the durable permit to remember and stages the tabs you already have open, so your first search isn't empty. Those staged pages go into a quarantine that nothing can search yet; they only join your real memory later in the walk, once the desktop app is paired.

If this browser already knows who you are, you get a one-line Welcome back card instead of the full sign-in form, with the same continue and the same "not now".

Sign in has the details of what the sign-in round trip does and how to recover a lost license.

3. Vault

Retrace needs a Mac app: it is where your memory is stored, encrypted, and where Find and Ask are actually computed. This screen downloads the installer for you and hands it over — you double-click, and the screen waits and watches for the app to open. If the app is already on this Mac, the screen is skipped.

4. Assembly

A paragraph types itself out, one sentence at a time, narrating what is happening: this browser pairing with the Mac app, your staged pages catching up into the real store, and the AI models downloading. You watch it assemble rather than staring at a spinner.

Pairing asks for one deliberate gesture, and it happens in the browser: setup shows a code and an Allow button. The same code appears when you right-click Retrace in your Mac menu bar, so you can check the two match. Only a real click on Allow counts — a synthetic one is ignored.

Two optional detours open over this screen and return to it:

Pick tools — put the tools you use for a project onto your rail. Skipping it costs nothing.
Bring in your history — import the browsing history this browser already keeps, so your memory starts a month full rather than empty. Chrome asks for the history permission at that moment and never at install; skip it and it is never requested. The import stores addresses, the titles Chrome already holds, visit times, and how one visit led to the next — never page content.

Go

The Go button lights up once your memory is actually searchable and the answering model has been verified — not before, so the button never lies about being ready. Clicking it closes the setup tab and puts you back on the tab you came from, with the rail arriving and Find open on something you have already read.

The rail

The rail is Retrace's home base on the page — Spaces, Tools, Find, and Ask all live there. It has three states — closed, narrow, and wide — and no single click cycles all three. Each control does one thing:

The toolbar icon and Alt+Shift+J are the same control: they hide the rail, or bring it back at whatever width you last had. Neither changes the width.
The chip at the edge of the screen opens a closed rail to its narrow width, without changing the width you prefer.
The chevron on the rail changes its width: narrow ⇄ wide. It never closes the rail.

Hotkeys (Mac):

Alt+Shift+J — toggle the rail (hide it, or bring it back at its last width)
Alt+Shift+K — open Find (search what you've remembered)
Alt+Shift+L — open Ask (grounded Q&A over what you've remembered)
Alt+Shift+T — open Find on your open tabs

You can rebind these from chrome://extensions/shortcuts.

Remembering, after setup

There is nothing to click. Retrace remembers the pages you visit — not only the tab you clicked the toolbar icon on — and it does so whether or not the rail is showing. On a supported page (Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Gmail) it also reads the structured content while you read.

Remembering is checked against three live conditions on every page, and a page that fails any of them is dropped rather than queued: you are signed in, your license is current, and the Retrace desktop app is running and paired to this profile. Sites you've excluded and incognito windows are never remembered.

To stop remembering without signing out, turn on Pause remembering in Settings. It is off when Retrace ships, so remembering runs from the moment you sign in during setup; Find and Ask keep working on what you've already saved while it's paused.

What gets remembered

The text of the page (body content, not chrome).
The URL and title.
A timestamp so you can recall "the article I read on Tuesday."
For Google Docs / Sheets / Slides, structure-aware content — sheet cells, slide text, comments rendered visible while you read.

What doesn't get remembered

Tabs whose page never loaded. A tab you opened in the background is remembered once it loads — Retrace doesn't wait for you to bring it to the front.
Pages on chrome://, the Chrome Web Store, or other privileged surfaces.
Anything from incognito windows (Chrome blocks extensions there by default).
Iframes from a third-party domain unless you're actively reading that frame.

Remembered content stays on your device and is never sent to our servers. The sensitive bodies of remembered pages — the text, title, and summary — are encrypted at rest; some fields are deliberately not, because they back the local search indexes: the visit trail (URL, hostname, timestamp) and the search embeddings are stored in the clear on your own disk.

Encryption at rest depends on the encrypted store being available. If your browser profile can't open it, Retrace falls back to unencrypted browser storage rather than losing your memory, and pages saved while that lasts are not encrypted at rest — there is no sweep back, so those pages stay unencrypted. Settings → Manage memory prints a Limited storage line whenever the fallback is the store that answered. The absence of that line is not a promise the other way: it means Retrace has nothing to report, not that it has confirmed encryption. See Privacy for the full data path.

Find what you just read

Open Find:

Click the search icon on the rail, or
Press Alt+Shift+K.

A search box opens as an in-page overlay over the active tab. Type a few words you remember from the page you just read. Within a couple hundred milliseconds, source cards appear — one per remembered page, each showing the matched snippet windowed onto the term that hit.

Find never waits on the answering model. It uses hybrid keyword + semantic search, computed by the desktop app's local core on your machine — and if the search model is still warming up, Find falls back to keyword-only and shows an inline indicator saying so.

Click a source card to jump to the page. If the page is still open in a tab, Retrace switches to that tab. If not, it re-opens it — and on supported tools, lands you back on the part you were reading.

Ask your first question

Open Ask:

Click the chat icon on the rail, or
Press Alt+Shift+L.

Type a question about what you've been reading — something like "what was the article about local LLMs from earlier today?" or "summarize the Google Doc I had open about pricing."

Ask is grounded: the answer cites the pages it drew from. Click a citation to open the source it used.

What to expect on the first Ask

Ask is answered by the Retrace desktop app, not by the browser. The extension hands your question to the desktop app's local core, which retrieves the relevant remembered pages, generates the answer on-device, and verifies each claim against its sources before anything is shown. If the desktop app isn't installed or running, Ask will tell you so instead of answering — the vault screen in setup is how you get it (see Install).

The three AI models Retrace runs locally — the answering model, the search embedding model, and the answer-verification model — download from our own CDN (models.sauvrn.ai) during the assembly screen. Together they're about 7.2 GB, and the app checks for roughly 8.2 GB of free disk before it starts — it refuses with a clear message rather than failing partway. This one-time download can take a few minutes on a fast connection and longer on a slow one. Every file is verified against a SHA-256 hash compiled into the app itself; a file that doesn't match is rejected and the download fails closed.

Once the models have downloaded, they're cached on your machine — no second download, and no network call when you Ask. The models run entirely on your device; your question and the answer never leave it.

While the answer is being produced, Ask shows a phase line — Reading your pages… while it gathers evidence, then Thinking… while it composes — so a slow answer is never silent. If you change topic mid-thread, Ask redirects instead of repeating the previous answer.

What's next

Once Find and Ask both work, the rest of Retrace is incremental:

Build a Space for a project — group the tabs and tools you use for it, and launch them from the rail.
Keep reading. Remembering compounds — the more pages Retrace has seen, the better Find and Ask get.
Read the Privacy commitment so you know exactly what does (and doesn't) cross the network.

If anything in this walkthrough didn't behave the way it's described, please tell us via the Send feedback form inside the extension. The in-product form auto-attaches your extension version and a sanitized diagnostic payload — see Support for the full triage flow.