A browser
for suckers.
Chromium renders the pages. Virgin owns everything else — the native UI, the profiles, the permissions, the blocker, your history. Nothing leaves the machine because there is nowhere for it to go.
Only available for Linux users. Windows and macOS suckers, just wait — it will be coming soon, bitch.
Local-first
There is no cloud. That is the whole feature.
No account
Nothing to sign into. Application data lives under ~/.local/share/virgin/ and stays there.
No sync
History, bookmarks and sessions are local SQLite. They never travel.
No telemetry
No analytics SDK, no crash uploader, no Virgin endpoint of any kind.
Honest caveat: websites, search providers, DNS and the filter-list sources you configure still receive the network traffic required to use them. Virgin removes its own middleman, not the internet.
The blocker
EasyList, EasyPrivacy, and a YouTube grudge.
An ABP-style network-rule engine with exceptions, domain and resource constraints, a domain trie, token index and Aho-Corasick matching — plus cosmetic CSS rules and first-party YouTube ad cleanup. Lists refresh over HTTPS at startup when they are missing or older than seven days.
Remote scriptlets are never executed. Corrupt caches are rejected. Active rules swap atomically.
requests blocked on this page
- Trackers
- 94
- Ad requests
- 31
- Cosmetic rules applied
- 13
Illustrative counters. Virgin reports real per-site counts in the shield popover.
Identity boundaries
Three kinds of you, kept apart.
01
Normal
A persistent profile with session restore, local history, bookmarks and remembered permission choices.
02
Private
A true off-the-record profile. No history or session records are written, and the native profile is destroyed after the last private window closes.
03
Container
Profiles you create yourself, each with its own storage boundary, cookies and permission decisions.
Controls
Hands stay on the keyboard.
Straight answer
This is an engineering preview, not a security-audited 1.0.
No password manager, no cloud sync, no extension layer, no custom TLS stack, no agent API. Desktop lab coverage and blocker performance work are still ahead. Read the boundaries before you trust it with anything that matters.