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Install

Setup starts and finishes in the browser.

  1. Add to Chrome, then pin Retrace to the toolbar so the icon is always visible.
  2. The extension opens its own setup tab. Sign in there to start your trial.
  3. The setup tab hands you the Retrace desktop app — it downloads it, you double-click to install, and it waits for the app to open and connect this browser. You do not have to go looking for it.

That desktop app is where your memory lives and where Find and Ask are computed, on your machine — so it is still required, and the setup tab is how you get it. It needs an Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or later).

If a step doesn't work, email support@sauvrn.ai and tell us what you saw — include your macOS version and your Chrome version.

Permissions

Retrace asks for read access to every site you browse (http://*/* and https://*/*), not just the tab you clicked the icon on. That is the product: a memory of what you read can only be built by reading the pages you read. Chrome will show you that as a broad-access warning at install, and it is accurate — we would rather say so here than have you find it on the consent sheet.

It also asks for the browser APIs the rail and the local memory need: your tab list and tab groups (URL and title only, for jumping back and for Spaces), navigation events, script injection for its own bundled reader, local storage, alarms, sign-in, and the native-messaging channel to the Retrace desktop app.

It asks for one more, and Chrome adds a downloads warning to the consent sheet for it. That one is for step 3: the setup tab saves the Retrace installer for you, and opens it when you click. Retrace uses it for that single file — it does not read your download history. The only download it ever looks up is the installer it started itself, matched by both its download id and its sauvrn.ai address, so nothing else can come back. While setup is on screen it also watches for download progress, and Chrome delivers those events for any download; Retrace ignores every one that is not its own installer, and stops listening once setup is done.

Retrace does not request access to your bookmarks or your passwords. Browsing history is the one thing it can ask for later: setup offers to bring in the history this browser already keeps, and only if you choose that import does Chrome ask — an optional permission, requested at that moment and never at install. Skip the import and it is never requested. What the import stores is the address, the title Chrome already holds, the visit times, and how one visit led to the next — never page content — and every row obeys the same exclusions as live remembering.

What limits Retrace is not the permission list — it is where remembered content is allowed to go. It goes to your own device and nowhere else: page content, your searches, and your answers never leave your machine, and the extension contacts our servers for sign-in and license checks, to fetch the desktop-app installer once during setup (step 3 above), and — only if you opt in — diagnostics and feedback. See Privacy for the full accounting.

After install

Continue to Sign in to connect your license.