How to Browse Linked Pages from a Vault Document
When a vault document was imported from a web page, the document viewer turns into a small markdown-based browser. Click any link inside the document, and the next page is fetched, converted to clean markdown, and displayed right where the previous one was. A back button keeps your trail.
This guide shows how to use that surface and what to expect.
Prerequisites
Section titled “Prerequisites”- A document vault with at least one document that came from a web page
- A document either:
- Saved from the chat using Add to vault (any open browser tab), or
- Imported through the Wikipedia panel that appears when you click a node in the knowledge graph viewer
Local files (.md, .pdf, .docx, .html imported from disk) do not become navigable. They render as plain markdown like before. Only documents with a known web origin are treated as browsable.
Open a navigable document
Section titled “Open a navigable document”- Open the vault overlay and select your vault.
- In the Documents list, click a document that was originally a web page. The viewer pane opens with a header showing the source label (for example, “Wikipedia”) and the page title.
- The document is now displayed as a navigable surface. The Add to vault button is replaced by an In vault badge, since the page is already saved.
Click links to navigate
Section titled “Click links to navigate”Click any link inside the rendered markdown. The viewer briefly shows a “Fetching page…” state, then replaces its content with the linked page, also rendered as markdown.
Each navigation pushes the previous page onto a back stack. When the stack has at least one entry, a small Back arrow appears at the top-left of the viewer header.
You can hop several pages deep, then click Back to return to where you came from. Going back never re-fetches: pages are kept in memory for the session.
Open a link in your real browser instead
Section titled “Open a link in your real browser instead”Hold any modifier key while clicking — Ctrl, Cmd, Shift, or Alt — or use a middle-click. The viewer ignores the click, and the browser opens the link in a new tab as usual.
The header also has a small external-link icon next to the Add to vault button. Click it to open the current page in a real browser tab.
Close the navigable view
Section titled “Close the navigable view”Click the X at the top-right of the viewer header. The viewer closes, the document is unscoped, and the chat returns to your full-vault view.
What gets fetched, where, and what’s safe
Section titled “What gets fetched, where, and what’s safe”In-viewer fetches go through the extension’s background worker, which sidesteps the cross-origin restrictions that would otherwise block in-page fetches. The fetched HTML is processed by the same Readability-based extraction the rest of Daneel uses for page Q&A, then sanitized with DOMPurify before it lands in the viewer. Scripts, inline event handlers, and dangerous attributes are stripped — nothing the page sends can execute.
See Privacy Model for the broader picture of what stays local and what leaves your machine.
Limits and known trade-offs
Section titled “Limits and known trade-offs”- Some sites refuse to cooperate. Pages that gate everything behind a login, or that aggressively detect non-browser fetches, will fail to load. When this happens you get an error toast, and the viewer stays on the current page — your back stack is preserved.
- Readability is not perfect. It is excellent for article bodies but sometimes drops sidebars, callouts, or rich-formatted elements. If a page looks too thin in the viewer, use the external-link icon to open the original.
- Image links are not navigated. Direct links to image files (
.jpg,.png,.svg, etc.) open in the browser instead of attempting markdown extraction. - In-page anchors (
#section) keep their default scroll behavior and are not intercepted. - There is no forward button yet — the back stack is one-way for now. Use the document list to start a new navigation.
- Local file documents are not navigable. Their links, if any, behave like normal browser links.
Save a hopped-to page back into the vault
Section titled “Save a hopped-to page back into the vault”If you navigate to a page you’d like to keep, click Add to vault in the viewer header. The page is added to the active vault as a new markdown document with its source URL recorded. You can reopen it later as a navigable surface, just like the page you started from.