No matter what stage of school you're in, Desk gives you the workspace tools to actually get through your work, not more tabs to get lost in.
No setup wizard hunting through menus. Three steps and you're studying.
Grab the alpha build for Windows, as an installer or a portable copy if you'd rather not install anything.
A short onboarding wizard sets your shortcuts, theme and homepage in under a minute, then gets out of your way for good.
Split a PDF into Scholar Mode, start a pomodoro in the Live Capsule, and let Desk handle the rest while you study.
Desk is built by a small team of students who were tired of browsers designed to keep them scrolling. So we built the opposite, a browser that works the way a study session actually does.
Every feature we build starts from a real study problem we've hit ourselves, not a growth metric or an ad slot. If it doesn't help you focus or learn, we don't build it.
No infinite feeds, no dark patterns, nothing engineered to steal another minute. Desk is measured by how quickly it gets out of your way.
No accounts, no telemetry, no cloud. Your notes, history, and habits live on your device and belong to you. That's a promise, not a setting.
These aren't extensions bolted on. They're built into the browser itself.
A split-pane study workspace built for multitasking. Annotate PDFs with a pressure-sensitive pen, browse references, take notes, and draw on blank pages side by side.
A morphing pill in your toolbar that carries your pomodoro timer and now-playing music everywhere you browse. Focus stays in sight, never in the way.
EasyList, EasyPrivacy and uBlock Origin filters built in, which includes YouTube ad skipping. No extension needed, on by default.
Experience true private browsing in a fully separate window and session. No data is saved and no history is tracked. It simply vanishes when you close the window.
A drag-and-drop widget grid with to-dos, screen time, weather and custom containers that hold other widgets. Your start page, your layout.
Tabs you haven't touched slowly fade, so stale tabs stop shouting for attention and the ones that matter stand out. Set your own fade timing, pin the tabs that should never dim, and wake a faded tab instantly with a single click.
Clipboard drawer, AI search, notes & to-dos, timers and a full media controller with per-app volume, all in one panel that slides in and disappears when you don't need it.
A lineage tracker that maps how your tabs branched from each other. Retrace any of your research rabbit hole across sessions.
Accent colours extracted straight from your wallpaper, saved presets and a full history. Fine-tune any pulled accent by hand, and roll back through your theme history whenever you like.
Curated Books of saved pages grouped into Chapters, not just a flat bookmarks list. Bind an entire Wayline research branch into a Book in one click.
A separate search bar for the lookups you don't want cluttering your record, right in the sidebar. Ask it something and it's like it never happened, nothing typed there touches your browsing history.
A clean, distraction-free reading view with somewhere for what you read to go. Save any page into your Webpage Diary, then export it into a Bookshelf Book or keep it in the sidebar Drawer.
A real, built-in media player, no more juggling a separate tab just to skip a track or pause a video.
Look up a word without leaving the page, pulled live from an online source, right in the sidebar so a quick definition never costs you a new tab.
A calculator that lives in the sidebar for the maths you don't want to open a new tab for, quick sums without breaking your flow.
Hover a link and an interactive preview pops up on the spot. Open it for real, or wave it off without ever loading a new tab.
What you get built in, that a mainstream browser leaves for you to cobble together yourself.
Click through what a real session in Desk looks like.
Scholar Mode splits the window into two independent panes where you can put a PDF on one side and a website, note or blank page on the other. Annotate with a pressure and velocity-sensitive digital pen that has shapes, a highlighter and two eraser modes, then save your annotated work as a PDF or images, unsaved edits auto-duplicate so you never lose the original. Sync-scroll both panes to compare documents line by line, or turn on Active Recall Blur to hide a pane and quiz yourself on what you just read.
The Live Capsule is a shared slot in the toolbar where your pomodoro timer and now-playing music live, morphing from pill to panel whenever you need controls. It runs a full pomodoro, stopwatch and countdown with full-screen break alerts, drives system-level media controls with per-app volume mixing, and can auto-silence every other audio source the moment you start focusing.
Try the real thing below, this one actually runs:
A tiny taste of the Live Capsule. The full version lives in every Desk window.
Every new tab is a bento grid you design yourself. Drag, resize and nest widgets in containers, then get to work: a to-do list shared with the sidebar so it follows you everywhere, a screen-time chart that keeps your habits honest, container widgets that group other widgets and move as one, and glassmorphism cards that sit over your own wallpaper instead of a flat background.
Close Eye is Desk's private mode. It runs as a completely separate window with its own isolated session, not a tab flag, but a different world, with a fully separate session partition so cookies, storage and history never touch your main profile. Everything evaporates the moment the window closes, it has its own dedicated homepage so you always know where you are, and ad and tracker blocking still applies the whole time.
Desk ships with network-level ad and tracker blocking powered by the same filter lists as uBlock Origin, so no extension or setup are needed. YouTube ads get skipped automatically, including the unskippable ones, and a live counter on the toolbar shield tracks blocked elements in real time. Add a site to the per-site allowlist when you want to support a creator, and refresh the filter lists yourself in one click whenever you want the latest rules.
Bookshelf turns saved pages into curated Books grouped by Chapter, so a research topic reads like a table of contents instead of a pile of bookmarks. Bind an entire Wayline research branch into a new Book in one click, then reorganise it freely, Chapters can be renamed and reordered anytime. An auto-built Appendix surfaces every PDF and image saved anywhere in the Book, and Bookshelf remembers exactly where you left off, so reopening a Book resumes right where you were.
Wayline tracks how your tabs branch off each other as you research, building a visual map of every rabbit hole instead of a flat history list. Follow a thread back to where it started, retrace an entire session across days, or bind a whole branch straight into a Bookshelf Book once you know it's worth keeping.
Access your clipboard, notes, to-dos, timers, AI search tools, and media mixer instantly. The Desk sidebar slides in from the right whenever you need it and disappears when you don't.
Desk has no account, no telemetry and no cloud. Your history, notes, annotations and clipboard all live on your device and nowhere else. Blocking trackers isn't a setting you find later; it's the default.
Read our privacy promises →Desk is currently in alpha for Windows 10 and 11, as both an installer and a portable build. Other platforms are on the roadmap once the Windows build stabilises.
Yes. The alpha is completely free, and the core browser will stay free.
Email us at deskbrowserofficial@gmail.com with the subject "Desk Alpha Access" and we'll send you the latest build with setup instructions.
Yes, Desk combines network-level filter lists (EasyList, EasyPrivacy and uBlock Origin's filters) with a YouTube-specific skipper that fast-forwards and dismisses ads the lists can't catch.
The onboarding wizard lets you set up your favourite sites and shortcuts in seconds. Full bookmark import from Chrome and Firefox is planned during the alpha.
None. There's no telemetry, no analytics and no account system. Everything you do in Desk is stored locally on your machine. See our privacy page for the full breakdown.
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