Posts on unweb.org

A Hotel Site Quotes a Returning Visitor More for the Same Room

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Picture someone planning a weekend away. They look at a room on Monday, think about it, and come back on Wednesday to book. The price has gone up, and a red label says only two rooms are left. Did the price really change, or did the site just recognise them? This case study runs on a made-up hotel page that behaves the way some real ones are suspected to.

With one browser you can’t tell. Every visit you make carries the cookie from the last one. Unweb can put a returning visitor and two newcomers on the same page at the same moment.

A News Paywall Counts Your Free Articles and a Stranger Starts From Zero

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Many news sites give you a few free articles a month, then ask you to subscribe. The count has to live somewhere, and on most sites it lives in your browser: a cookie that goes up by one with every article. This case study uses a made-up news site, The Daily Ledger, with a meter of three.

For a reader, that explains why a private window sometimes gets you past the wall. For a publisher, it’s worth knowing what a newcomer sees, and how easy the meter is to reset.

A Search Page Puts a Shop You Visited Above Everything Else

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you work in search, you’ve probably had this argument. Your page ranks third. A colleague says it ranks first. You’re both looking at the same query on the same day, and you’re both right, because the results were shaped by what each of you did before.

That makes checking rankings from your own browser close to useless. What you need is the page a first-time searcher sees, next to the one a returning visitor sees.

A Shop Sets Seven Cookies Before Anyone Answers Its Cookie Banner

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A cookie banner asks “Can we use cookies?” and most people assume nothing happens until they answer. This case study runs on a made-up outdoor shop, Peak Outfitters, built the way plenty of real shops are: the banner is there, and so are the cookies.

The strip above every stranger counts the cookies in its store. A stranger starts with none, so the count is exactly what the site handed over since the page opened.

An Airline Fare Climbs Every Time the Same Visitor Looks Again

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Most people who book flights have a theory about this. You check a fare, check it again an hour later, and it’s gone up. A warning appears saying four other people are looking. Is the seat really selling out, or has the site learned that you want it?

This case study runs on a made-up airline page built to do the suspicious thing on purpose. Each time the same visitor comes back, the fare goes up a step. Nothing else changes.

Checking Which Ad a News Page Shows Readers in Four Countries

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Say you’ve paid for a campaign that should run in Germany and France and nowhere else. The dashboard says it’s live. But the dashboard is the ad network’s word for it. The only way to be sure is to load the page as a reader in each country would.

Doing that by hand means a VPN, switching countries, clearing cookies between tries, and screenshots you line up later. Unweb does it in one window. A saved setup holds four strangers, each with its own location. You open the setup and type the address once.

Comparing Prices by Country With Two Proxies Side by Side

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Travel sites, software shops and streaming services often show different prices to different countries. They usually decide from your IP address, which is why a newcomer’s browser alone doesn’t show it. You need the visit to come from somewhere else.

Unweb gives each stranger a location: a proxy you have. Put strangers through proxies in different countries, type one address, and they load the same page from different places at the same time.

How Unweb Was Tested to Prove Nothing Carries Over Between Strangers

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Unweb makes one promise above the rest: nothing carries over. Not between two strangers open at once, not from a closed stranger to a new one, not into your everyday browser, and nothing stays on disk once a stranger closes. A promise like that is easy to state and easy to break by accident, so the tests don’t take Unweb’s word for anything.

The self-test runs the real app, on the system’s own web engine, against small web servers on the same machine. One plays a site at 127.0.0.1, another plays a third party at localhost, which counts as a different site. Every request they receive is logged with its cookies, and with any cached ID the browser sends back. Those logs decide each check.

Saving a Setup to Recheck the Same Page Every Week

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Some checks are worth repeating. An SEO consultant looks at how a client’s page ranks in three countries every Monday. A shop owner checks that a new visitor still gets the welcome offer after each site update. Setting up the same strangers by hand each time gets old fast.

A setup saves a window’s strangers, each with its language and location, under a name. It holds nothing a stranger saw: no address, no cookie, no history. Open it again and you get the same strangers, brand new.

Seeing Both Sides of a Checkout AB Test at Once

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A site owner runs a test. Half the visitors get the old checkout, half get a new one with a lower price and a different button. Then someone asks what version B actually looks like on the live site, and nobody on the team can show them, because their browsers were sorted into A weeks ago and the cookie keeps them there.

The usual fixes are a private window, then another, or clearing cookies over and over until the coin lands the other way. Each new try forgets the one before, so you never see the two side by side.

Unweb Launches as a Free Browser Where Every Visit Is a First Visit

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Unweb is out, at version 0.3, for Windows, macOS and Linux. It’s a small browser that opens strangers. A stranger has no history, no logins and no cookies, and when you close it, everything it picked up is deleted from your computer.

The idea came from a simple annoyance. Your everyday browser is soaked in you, so you never see a site the way a newcomer does. Private windows help a little, but they share one session with each other and are awkward to run in parallel. You can’t easily put three fresh visitors next to each other and watch what each one gets.

What Your Browser Remembers About You and Why Sites Show You a Different Web

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Open a shop you’ve visited before and it often greets you differently. Free shipping instead of a discount. A price that isn’t the one your friend saw. Results ordered around what you clicked last week. None of it is random. Your browser told the site who you are before the page even loaded.

It does this without asking, because that’s what browsers are built to do. Remembering makes the web convenient: you stay logged in, your basket survives, pages load faster. The same memory is what sites use to recognise you.

Why the Browser Is Called Unweb

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The web you see isn’t quite the web. It’s the web after a thousand small decisions made about you: the cookies a site found, the account you’re logged in to, what you clicked last month. Every page arrives already fitted to you.

Unweb takes that fitting off. Each window opens strangers, browsers that have never been anywhere, so a site has nothing to go on. What’s left is the web a newcomer gets, which is the web most people meet for the first time.