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

- A [document vault](/guides/first-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](/how-to/explore-knowledge-graph/)

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

1. Open the vault overlay and select your vault.
2. 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.
3. 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

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

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

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

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](https://github.com/cure53/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](/concepts/privacy/) for the broader picture of what stays local and what leaves your machine.

## 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

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.