Argus for anonymous research

Isolation

Every session opens clean and leaves nothing behind

An ordinary browser is a running record of everywhere you have been. Cookies from last month, storage a script wrote in the background, a cache that says which images you already have — a site does not need to ask who you are when the browser volunteers it.

Each Argus profile starts from its own directory: its own storage, its own cache, its own cookie jar, with session restore disabled so a previous run cannot resurface in a new one. The proxy is applied at the network layer rather than through an extension a page can detect, and a default block list covers the remote-access ports sites probe to spot automation. Two pieces of research done in two profiles have nothing in common to find.

Fingerprints

Blend in rather than disappear

The instinct is to block everything, and it is the wrong one. A browser that refuses to report a canvas, has no fonts, claims no GPU and sits in a timezone that contradicts its language is not anonymous — it is the most distinctive visitor of the day. Anti-fingerprinting that works looks like an ordinary machine, not like an absence.

Argus generates a coherent hardware identity per profile: platform, CPU cores, memory, screen, timezone and languages produced together as one set, with the user-agent and its UA-CH metadata generated to match. Canvas, WebGL — including the reported vendor and renderer — and audio are handled in the renderer, so a script reads the spoofed value because it is the only value present, not because a wrapper hid the real one. Each surface can run as real, noise, off, or a value you pin yourself.

Proxies

Arrive from somewhere that is not your desk

Bring proxies from whichever provider you already use — Argus does not sell bandwidth and does not route your traffic — and assign one per profile from the shared library. HTTP and SOCKS5 both work, including the authenticated SOCKS5 variant plain Chromium cannot speak at all.

Two behaviours matter more here than anywhere else. A proxy that fails its health check blocks the launch instead of falling back to your own connection — the fallback is how a careful session accidentally arrives from your actual address. And WebRTC leak protection is enforced as browser policy on every profile, beneath the JavaScript layer, so a page cannot read your real address around the proxy. It is applied to every profile rather than being a toggle you can forget.

Profiles · Cookie sets

A persona you can come back to

Research is rarely one sitting. A profile keeps its identity, its proxy and its cookie jar between launches, so the account you registered a fortnight ago opens on the same device it was created on rather than looking like it has moved countries and changed computers.

Sessions can be saved as cookie sets and reassigned, and profiles carry tags, status labels and notes so a long-running piece of work does not depend on remembering which of them was which.

The honest part

What this is not

Argus is an anti-detect browser. It changes what a website can attribute to you and how easily two of your sessions can be joined. That is a real and useful thing, and it is the whole of what we claim.

It is not Tor and it is not a VPN. Your traffic goes to whichever proxy you chose, and that operator can see it — choosing them is a decision you are making, not one we make for you. It is not protection against an adversary with legal reach over your provider, your device or your accounts. And it does nothing about what you type: a persona that signs into a real account, or reuses a name, has identified itself, and no browser setting undoes that.

If you are doing this as reporting, the neighbouring page is written for that: Argus for journalists. What we do with your own data is a separate question, answered in the privacy policy.