# Apogee brings private AI summaries into the browser
Apogee, an open-source browser extension inspired by Mozilla's discontinued Orbit project, is offering local AI summaries without requiring an account, API key or cloud service. The project's repository describes a tool that can work with web pages, videos, PDFs, DOCX files and pasted text while keeping processing on the user's device.
The extension can use WebGPU for accelerated inference in Chromium-based browsers. It also supports WebAssembly, which is the default path on Firefox and can serve as a fallback on Chromium devices without suitable WebGPU support. Users seeking larger models can connect the extension to an Ollama or llama.cpp server running on their own computer. According to the project, those connections are restricted to the local loopback address.
Apogee's local-first design covers more than model execution. Its repository says tokenisation, retrieval and caching also happen on the device. A model is downloaded during the first in-browser run and can then operate from the local cache while offline. The project says page contents, transcripts, documents and generated summaries are not uploaded to cloud AI providers.
The extension includes extractors for common publishing and discussion sites, including Wikipedia, GitHub, Reddit, Hacker News, Bluesky, Mastodon, Stack Overflow and arXiv. It can create timestamped summaries of supported video pages, preserve discussion-thread structure, and answer follow-up questions using passages retrieved from longer documents. On Chromium, summary points can also link users back to the corresponding source passage.
Other controls include custom standing instructions, optional focus terms and multilingual output. Apogee excludes a list of sensitive sites from persistent caching, including major webmail, messaging and workplace communications services. Its YouTube SponsorBlock integration can be disabled; when enabled, the project says it uses a shortened anonymity-oriented hash rather than sending the full video identifier.
The project positions these choices as a response to the architecture of Mozilla Orbit. Orbit also explored browser-assisted summarisation, but Apogee's maintainers say that service depended on central servers and retained summaries remotely. Apogee instead has no dedicated backend or telemetry service, according to its documentation.
The extension is available through browser stores, while its source, architecture notes, model reference and security documentation are published in the repository. The repository also invites contributions to its extraction system and provides a fixture-based test process that can run without downloading a model. The supplied evidence establishes the project's current capabilities and stated privacy model, but does not independently audit those claims or provide comparative performance measurements.
