OE Bridge

OE Bridge is the Chrome and Edge extension included with OpenEnsemble. It lets you ask about a page and use selected browser workflows without giving OE ambient access to your tabs.

Install

1. In OE, open Settings → Browser and choose Download OE Bridge.
2. Extract the downloaded ZIP.
3. Open chrome://extensions or edge://extensions.
4. Turn on Developer mode.
5. Choose Load unpacked and select the extracted openensemble-bridge folder.
6. Pin OpenEnsemble Bridge from the browser’s extensions menu.

This works from any household member’s computer; they do not need command-line access or access to the OE server’s filesystem.

Pair this browser

Open the Bridge popup, enter your OE server address if it was not discovered, and choose Pair this browser. Open the approval link and confirm the code in OE. Each household member should pair from a separate browser profile so their identity and permissions remain isolated.

The extension receives a browser-only credential, not your OE web-session token. You can revoke a paired browser from OE at any time; revocation also disconnects its live socket.

On a profile’s first pairing, OE explicitly offers to enable Agent browser access at the same time. It can also be changed later under Settings → Browser or Settings → Skills. Pairing and activation are separate: a paired extension can use its user-initiated chat features while agent browser tools remain off. If an administrator manages the profile’s tools, only the administrator can allow or unlock this capability.

Permission model

• Ask about this page sends one bounded snapshot for the question you initiated. It does not create an ongoing grant.
• Browser commands need a short-lived lease granted from the extension UI. A lease applies to one tab and the site showing when you granted it.
• Opening a URL still requires an Allow once confirmation in the extension.
• Navigating to another site suspends the lease until you explicitly resume it.
• Consequential actions such as opening tabs, ambiguous clicks, and media control require per-use confirmation.
• Login, payment, banking, health, password-manager, private-network, and browser-internal pages fail closed.

The toolbar badge is the authoritative lease indicator. ON means a lease is active; the pause symbol means navigation suspended it. Closing the browser clears session leases.

Local ad and tracker blocking

The Bridge popup includes a local blocking switch. When it is on, bundled filter lists block advertising and tracking requests, hide the leftover ad slots, and neutralise scripts that detect ad blockers — all inside the browser. Request details, matches, your tier choices, and your paused sites are never sent to OE, and Bridge never downloads a filter list. It never blocks a top-level navigation and does not depend on pairing or an agent tab lease.

Three tiers can be toggled independently:

• Ads (on) — banners, pop-ups, and sponsored placements.
• Trackers (on) — analytics and profiling scripts that follow you between sites. Google Analytics and Google’s ad tag are replaced with harmless stubs rather than removed outright, so pages that call them keep working.
• Cookie banners and nags (off) — more intrusive, and a few sites misbehave with it on. Turn it on if you would rather dismiss fewer consent dialogs.

The popup shows how many requests were blocked on the page you are looking at.

If a site misbehaves, use Pause on this site. That turns off every layer for that site — network rules, hidden elements, and scriptlets — and leaves the rest of your browsing untouched. Press it again to resume.

For an ad the lists miss, right-click it and choose Block this ad with OE. Bridge saves only a bounded, site-scoped element selector and applies it on later visits to that site. The on-page confirmation offers Undo; the popup can also undo the latest learned rule or clear all learned rules for the current site. Turning blocking off keeps learned rules but stops applying them until it is turned back on. Reload the page after changing any of these so already-started network requests reflect the new setting.

Blocking a specific domain

Some endpoints are pure telemetry and no public list covers them. To block one by name, open the popup and type it under Block a domain everywhere — for example log.byteoversea.com — then press Block. Pasting a full URL works too; Bridge keeps just the hostname.

A blocked domain covers its subdomains, applies on every site, and overrides the filter lists’ own exceptions, because you asked for it by name. Two things still win over it: pausing a site turns everything off there, and OE never blocks a top-level navigation, so a blocked domain still opens if you type it into the address bar. Remove an entry with Remove next to it.

Blocked domains are stored in your browser and are never sent to OE.

Keeping the lists current

The lists ship with the extension and work offline, so they age between OE releases. An OE admin can refresh them from Settings → Browser: OE fetches and reconverts the upstream lists itself, so your browser still only ever talks to OE. After a refresh, reload OE Bridge on the browser’s extensions page — Chrome only reads the bundled rules when the extension loads.

Field watches

The Bridge side panel can watch a value you explicitly select. The confirmation shows the exact page, selector, condition, and cadence. Routine checks return a bounded value record rather than page HTML, cookies, screenshots, or a general tab grant. You can list and revoke watches from the same panel.

Current custom-skill limitation

Bridge is shipped for OE’s built-in browser workflows. The public custom-skill surfaces sometimes described as ctx.browser, helpers.browser, or browser_list are not released yet. Custom skills should use RSS, public APIs, JSON-LD, or bounded server-side fetching until that API is documented and enforced by the same lease broker.

For implementation-level details and troubleshooting, see browser-extension/README.md in the OE install.