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First run

You've installed Retrace and connected your license. This page walks you through the first five minutes — pinning the rail, capturing your first page, and asking your first question — so you can tell that the extension is actually working before you trust it with anything important.

If you haven't installed yet, start at Install. If you're not signed in, start at Sign in.

1. Pin the rail

On any normal web page (a news article, a Wikipedia entry, a Google Doc you own — anything that isn't a chrome:// page or the Chrome Web Store itself):

  1. Click the Retrace icon in your Chrome toolbar.
  2. A thin rail mounts on the left edge of the page. This is the home base for everything Retrace does — Spaces, Tools, Find, and Ask all live here.
  3. Click the rail to cycle through its three states: closed, collapsed, and expanded. Pick whichever feels least intrusive.

The rail is per-tab. Retrace auto-mounts it on Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive, and Gmail. On other pages, the icon click is what activates it.

Hotkeys (Mac):

  • Alt+Shift+L — toggle the rail
  • Alt+Shift+K — open Find (search what you've captured)
  • Alt+Shift+J — open Ask (grounded Q&A over what you've captured)

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

2. Capture your first page

Retrace only remembers pages it's allowed to capture. By default, that means pages you're actively reading where the rail is mounted.

The easiest way to capture is to just read. On a supported page (Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Gmail), Retrace captures the visible content opportunistically while you read. You don't have to click anything.

On other pages, the rail's Remember action captures the page on demand.

Either way, you'll see the captured page appear in Find within a few seconds.

What gets captured

  • 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 captured

  • Inactive tabs you haven't opened.
  • 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.

Captured content is encrypted at rest using a key your browser owns — see Privacy for the full data path.

3. 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 captured. Within a couple hundred milliseconds, source cards appear — one per captured page, each showing the matched snippet windowed onto the term that hit.

Find is model-free. It uses hybrid keyword + semantic search and works even before Ask's model has finished downloading.

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.

4. Ask your first question

Open Ask:

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

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

The first time you open Ask, the model has to download. Specifically, Retrace fetches the Qwen3-4B model weights and the WASM runtime from HuggingFace. This is a one-time cost:

Connection Typical time
Fast home / office connection 2–5 minutes
Slow / metered connection 5–10 minutes, sometimes more

The first-run progress bar is monotonic — it never goes backwards. If it stalls, the issue is almost always upstream at HuggingFace; check status.huggingface.co.

Once the weights have downloaded, they're cached on your machine. Every subsequent Ask is instant — no network call, no second download. The model runs entirely in your browser; your question and the answer never leave your device.

While the model is generating, Ask shows a Thinking / Generating phase 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. Capture 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.