spatial-browser

spatial-browser is a Desktop Tooling Chromium fork that implements browser-level support for spatial web windows.

Why a fork

Stock browsers lack:

  • Parent-relative always-on-top for same-origin palette windows

  • Logical workspace grouping (viewport + palettes) on the OS taskbar

  • Reduced background throttling among workspace peer windows

Web apps can partially compensate with Document PiP and chromeless popups; professional multi-window workflows need browser cooperation.

Patch roadmap

Patch Goal Status

P1 — App window group

Shared workspace ID; Alt+Tab grouping

Stub / in progress

P2 — Parent-relative always-on-top

parenttop feature on window.open

Stub / in progress

P3 — Reduced peer throttling

Palettes stay live when viewport occluded

Planned

P4 — Tab strip decoupling

PWA multi-window without tab-strip coupling

Exploratory

Build

See the repository README for depot_tools, disk requirements, and scripts/setup.ps1.

Demo detection

The HCI Nerdz demo desk checks:

  • window.spatialBrowser — { workspaceGroup, parentRelativeTop }

  • User-agent token SpatialBrowser/ on branded builds

Load demo/spatial-browser-stub.js locally to simulate fork APIs during development.