The start page of every profile

You launch a profile and ARMANOS puts one page in front of the destination. It is generated on your machine and describes the identity this profile is about to wear.

On ARMANOS Browser the start page is tab one and the site is tab two, unless the browser reopens the tabs of last time. The built-in engine has no tab strip, so there the page takes the profile window and the site opens as a second window.

Tab two is the profile's own Opening address when you set one. When you did not, the profile goes to the address of its scenario.

When ARMANOS Browser reopens the last tabs by its On startup setting, they keep their order. The start page replaces last time's start page, and the site opens at the end only if it is not among them.

1. 1

   Tab one: the start page

   Built for this launch and served from the app itself rather than from the network.

2. 2

   Tab two: your destination

   The profile's own opening address, or the address of its scenario.

3. 3

   Then the restored tabs

   What you agreed to bring back after a crash.

The largest thing on the page is the address a site would see. Under it sit the country, the region, the city and the owner of that address.

An address on its own proves nothing unless you know your own by heart, so the page compares. The app learns your real address outside the profile proxy before a launch, and holds it an hour.

When your own address could not be learned, there is no verdict at all. An invented all clear is worse than silence, because people believe it and go to work through a dead proxy.

A small local server inside the app serves the page from your own machine. Each launch of a profile gives the page its own random address that nobody else can guess.

That random address matters even on your own machine: without it another program on this computer could walk your profiles by id. It stops working on the next launch, and also when the profile is stopped, deleted or moved.

Everything the page shows is already in it before it starts working. A profile name, a note or a tag cannot break it, whatever you put in them.

• Nothing loads from outside

  No external styles, scripts, fonts or images, even if the template asked for one.

• Five hosts for one lookup

  The only place the page goes is out for your exit address, and only to the five sources listed for it.

• Inline icons

  Icons sit inside the page itself, so nothing goes out for an image and no beacon is left behind.

• Nothing to submit or frame

  Nowhere to post, nowhere to re-base, and no page may put this one in a frame.

• Real headers not promises

  No store, no referrer and no sniffing arrive as real headers rather than as a promise in the markup.

The profile goes for the address itself, by the same route it takes to any site. That is what makes the answer its exit address rather than yours.

There are five sources, and the profile works through them in order, six seconds each, once through. Four of them return geography and the last returns the address alone, so a total outage of the geography services still shows you where you come out.

Four geo sources are there for a reason. These services are free and therefore rate limited, and each extra source is an independent quota.

The left card is the profile: name, group, scenario, profile ID, proxy line, launch time, notes and tags. The proxy line repeats the type, host and port, with a key chip when that proxy has a login.

The right card is the engine, with a badge you can read across the room. It names the engine and prints the version as it is, because claiming a newer number would only be caught by feature detection.

The card also states where substitution happens: inside the engine on ARMANOS Browser, before any page script runs, and at page-script level on the built-in one. Reading this line is how you notice the profile opened on the built-in engine, before you spend an hour on a site.

One card lists the User agent, platform, screen, languages, locale, time zone, CPU cores, memory, touch points, the WebGL vendor and renderer and the number of fonts.

These are not a second guess at the fingerprint. The card holds the very values the profile went out with, not ones that merely resemble them.

• User agent

  The full string on its own row, selectable, so you can paste it straight into a checker.

• Screen

  Width by height, with the pixel ratio and the colour depth printed beside it.

• Time zone, locale, languages

  The three values a site cross-checks against the country of your exit address.

• WebGL vendor and renderer

  The two strings a graphics probe reads first when it wants to know your hardware.

• Fonts

  How many faces the profile exposes: a site counts exactly the same number.

A row of five external checkers sits under the banner. They are the tools people in this line of work already use, and they sit on the page so that looking costs one click instead of a copied address.

You open them inside the same profile, so they read its fingerprint through its proxy. A second row holds ten everyday sites, and on ARMANOS Browser they are written once into the bookmarks bar of a profile that has none. When the Team bookmarks card has a list for this profile, the second row is called Team bookmarks and shows that list.

• BrowserScan

  A broad report over address and fingerprint in one pass.

• BrowserLeaks

  Separate pages per interface: canvas, WebGL, fonts, WebRTC, one at a time.

• CreepJS

  Looks for contradictions between values rather than just printing them.

• Pixelscan

  Looks for the signs of a substituted browser.

• IP2Location

  Where the exit address is placed, in the words of an address database.

A phone is not proved by a small screen and five touch points. So the page looks at the real window you opened it in and compares that with what the profile claims.

You read four disagreements in a row called What sites see: the window is wider than the declared screen, the orientation contradicts the screen shape, there are no touch events, or the pointer is not a coarse one.

This came out of a measurement rather than a guess. In the first seconds the window measured 500 points wide against a declared 393, and the orientation stayed the computer's, while the numbers on the card were green.