The browser with no servers behind it.
Browse the hyper:// web, install P2P apps, and publish sites pinned 24/7 — now with Lighthouse search that finds pages through people you trust, not a crawler.
pear run pear://tco5k7h38uoxatedp1wongdbhjxow1x7jiwm3t1i9cujbebhsbty
hyper://1868916a7a282ff0f211b11b536e9642828c32d3a817a254e1ef7e602709e25d/
inside PearBrowser to read it with no web server in the loop.
Search that runs on trust, not a crawler.
Lighthouse is a local-first personal full-text index over a social
trust graph. Pages you browse get tokenized, signed by a per-app
search subkey, and stored in a local Hyperbee — so Library search returns
in under 5ms with zero network.
- Federated “include trusted peers” (opt-in toggle). Local results paint instantly; a verified trusted-peer set then arrives over Hyperswarm and replaces them — each hit carries a provenance badge (you / trusted · hop N). Smoke-validated by a two-node federation test.
- Verify-and-drop trust model. Every federated row is re-verified client-side against the contact's identity binding and dropped on failure before it can touch ranking. The room is an index, not an authority.
- Deterministic, clock-free ranker. The same inputs produce identical ranking on every device — no timestamps, no central tiebreaker.
Local first. Verified peers second.
A query never waits on the network to feel fast — and never trusts the network without checking.
Paint locally
Your local Hyperbee index answers immediately — under 5ms, fully offline.
Ask trusted peers
If the opt-in toggle is on, the query fans out to your trust graph over Hyperswarm.
Verify & drop
Each returned row is re-verified against the contact's identity binding; forgeries are dropped before ranking.
Replace & rank
Survivors merge in with a provenance badge and a deterministic, clock-free order — identical on every device.
Three apps in one — each fully P2P.
No “P2P module bolted onto Chromium.” Built bottom-up on the Holepunch / Pear stack: Hyperswarm for discovery, Hyperdrive for storage, Hyperbee for local data, Ed25519 for identity.
Browse hyper://
Paste a drive key — hex or z-base-32 — and PearBrowser streams content directly from peers through the Hyperswarm DHT. Multi-tab browsing with keyboard shortcuts, back/forward, bookmarks, and history.
Install P2P apps
A decentralized app store that aggregates multiple Hyperdrive catalogs into one view — plus a writable personal “My Catalog.” Real apps are live today — Keet, Paste, Pear POS, Dealroom, Pear Tickets — each pinned 24/7 on HiveRelay, so they launch straight from a pear:// link even when the author is offline. The app opens in its own isolated window. No gatekeeper, no 30% cut.
Publish your own
A block-editor site publisher that one-click publishes and auto-pins to HiveRelay. It only reports “published” after a relay confirms replication — so the URL works the moment you share it.
Keys you own. Contacts you verify.
Your identity is local and portable, every app gets its own sub-key, and the people behind everything you federate — search, names, and your Nostr feed — are cryptographically vouched for.
BIP-39 identity + sub-keys
A 12-word backup phrase, restore-on-a-new-device, and a distinct appPubkey handed to every site. Settings → Connected Apps lists and revokes grants.
Nostr identity + feed Phase 3
Settings shows your npub and a one-click “Link (attested)” / Revoke control that cross-curve-binds your Nostr (secp256k1/BIP-340) key to your Pear Ed25519 root, with a monotonic epoch. Post NIP-01 notes signed with that key, then toggle “Include trusted contacts” to read notes a verified contact authored with their attested key — replicated peer-to-peer.
Every contact note is author-verified against their Contacts-held root; an un-attested author never reaches your feed. No public wss:// relays yet — the feed federates over your own trust graph.
Trusted-peer contacts
Add a contact from a signed invite URL — pubkey + name + signature + binding key. Invite signatures are verified at import and rejected if forged. One verified contact then powers all the federation: search results, resolvable names, and Nostr notes — each author-checked against the root you vouched for.
Opt-in capabilities, honestly labeled.
These live on the active development line. Each one is off by default and clearly scoped — no hidden behavior, no overclaim.
P2P names & petnames Experimental
Claim a memorable name in an owner-signed, multi-writer registry — pearname://alice (or a bare word) resolves to your drive in the URL bar, with a provenance chip. A tiered resolver runs your private petname → your own claims → names your trusted contacts claimed → a curated floor. First-claim-wins, durable across devices even when writers go offline, and confusable look-alikes (a Cyrillic раypal) are blocked. Off by default.
Encrypted device sync Experimental
Pair devices with a sync://<key>:<encKey> invite to converge bookmarks across your own machines over Autobase, verified by a two-device encrypted smoke test.
Scope today = bookmarks. Not full tabs / history / profile sync.
P2P-first fetch (privacy)
The proxy tries direct peer-to-peer first and only falls back to a HiveRelay HTTP gateway after a short grace window — so relays stop seeing fetches that peers could have served themselves.
Every site you visit, stays visitable.
Today's web is rented. The site you bookmarked five years ago is probably a 404 by now — the domain expired, the company pivoted, the host shut down, and your link died with it.
PearBrowser sites are Hyperdrives addressed by public key — no accounts, no DNS, no servers — replicated peer-to-peer and pinned 24/7 on the HiveRelay backbone. The publisher being offline doesn't take the site down, because the relays carry the bytes.
When you bookmark a hyper:// URL, you bookmark a thing that exists — not a thing that resolves to a thing if a company keeps paying for it.
hyper://key/ in hand.
Part of a P2P stack, not a silo.
PearBrowser sits alongside the HiveRelay backbone, a mobile sibling that speaks the same catalog and gateway contract, and a growing set of real companion apps.
hyper://.hyper:// drives from any browser via the HiveRelay HTTP gateway. Drop it into a blog, a PWA, or a link previewer.hyper:// pages with three trust tiers, per-app rate limits, a 1 MB/s/peer cap, and persistent grants.Up and running in thirty seconds.
PearBrowser is a Pear runtime app. Install the runtime once (it auto-fetches the matching native binary), then launch PearBrowser by its public key.
$ npm i -g pear
$ pear # bootstrap
# 2. Launch PearBrowser
$ pear run pear://tco5k7h38…ujbebhsbty
pear run pear://tco5k7h38uoxatedp1wongdbhjxow1x7jiwm3t1i9cujbebhsbty
pear run is deprecated as of Pear runtime v2.4.0 — it still works today and will for the foreseeable future. The longer-term path is signed native installers (.app / .exe / .deb) via pear build, coming to a release near you. Nothing breaks in the meantime.
- Need Node first? Install Node.js 20+ — Pear ships through npm.
- First-launch onboarding generates a BIP-39-backed identity and helps you pick a first site to visit.
- Tabs persist across launches — open today, close, reopen tomorrow, same tabs back.
- Pear updates itself — when a new PearBrowser release ships, your next launch hot-syncs the new bytes from the swarm.
The grown-up table.
For the people who scroll to the bottom first.
| Desktop version | v0.4.5 · production length 16842 · pinned on 5+ relays |
|---|---|
| Runtime | Pear (Bare + Chromium via pear-electron); pear run deprecated in runtime v2.4.0 |
| Core libraries | hyperswarm, hyperdrive, hyperbee, corestore, hypercore, autobase, p2p-hiverelay |
| Search | Lighthouse — local Hyperbee full-text index, signed by a per-app search subkey; opt-in federation over Hyperswarm (smoke-validated) |
| Identity | BIP-39 → Ed25519 root with per-app sub-keys; opt-in Nostr (secp256k1/BIP-340) — Phase 3: attested binding, post notes, federated feed over your trust graph (no public relays yet) |
| Bridge surface | window.pear.swarm.v1 — three trust tiers, per-app rate limits, 1 MB/s/peer cap (SWARM-V1.md) |
| Sync | Experimental, opt-in: sync:// Autobase device pairing — bookmarks only (two-device encrypted smoke test) |
| Platforms | macOS, Windows, Linux — all via the Pear runtime |
| License | Apache-2.0 |
| Launch key | pear://tco5k7h38uoxatedp1wongdbhjxow1x7jiwm3t1i9cujbebhsbty |
| This site (P2P) | hyper://1868916a7a282ff0f211b11b536e9642828c32d3a817a254e1ef7e602709e25d/ — the same page, pinned 24/7 on HiveRelay |
Honest answers.
Is Lighthouse search a global crawler?
No — that's the whole point. Lighthouse is a local-first personal index: pages you browse are tokenized, signed by a per-app search subkey, and stored in a local Hyperbee. Library search returns in under 5ms with zero network. If you opt in to “include trusted peers,” the query also fans out to your trust graph over Hyperswarm — never to a central crawler.
How can I trust results coming from other people?
Every federated row is re-verified client-side against the contact's identity binding and dropped on failure before it can affect ranking. Contacts only enter your trust graph through signed invite URLs that are verified at import and rejected if forged. The ranker is deterministic and clock-free, so the same inputs produce identical ordering on every device. The room is an index, not an authority.
How production-ready is federated search?
The local index is live and wired. Federation is smoke-validated by a two-node federation test — meaning the path works end-to-end, not that it's been run at production scale. Treat the opt-in toggle as the early-access feature it is.
Does the Nostr support mean I can post to relays from PearBrowser?
Not to public wss:// relays — not yet. What works today (Phase 3): Settings displays your npub and a one-click “Link (attested)” / Revoke control that cross-curve-binds your Nostr (secp256k1/BIP-340) key to your Pear Ed25519 root. You can post NIP-01 notes signed with that key, and read notes your verified contacts authored with their attested keys — all replicated peer-to-peer over your trust graph, with no relay servers in the middle. Public relay transport is a later, opt-in phase.
What exactly does device sync cover?
Today, bookmarks only. It's experimental and opt-in: you pair devices with a sync://<key>:<encKey> invite and bookmarks converge across your own machines over Autobase, verified by a two-device encrypted smoke test. It does not sync tabs, history, or your full profile yet.
What happens to my site when I close my laptop?
Nothing — that's the point. When you publish, the block editor signs a seed-request and HiveRelay pins the drive; PearBrowser only reports “published” after a relay confirms replication. The publisher can then be offline indefinitely while the relays serve the bytes to anyone with the key.
Can I read hyper:// from a regular browser?
Yes, via hyper-fetch — a small drop-in JS library that talks to the HiveRelay HTTP gateway. The full peer experience (publishing, identity, Lighthouse search, signed grants) still requires PearBrowser.
How do I install it — and is pear run going away?
pear run is deprecated as of Pear runtime v2.4.0, but it still works and will for the foreseeable future. The longer-term distribution path is signed native installers (.app / .exe / .deb) produced via pear build. Until those land, the pear run pear://… command above is the supported way in.
What if I lose my device?
If you backed up your 12-word BIP-39 phrase, you restore your identity on a new machine and your grants and per-app sub-keys come back with it. If you didn't back up, drives you published stay alive on the relays — but you can never update or unseed them. Write the phrase down.
Take your web off the cloud.
Run PearBrowser today: browse the hyper:// web, search your Library in under 5ms, install P2P apps, and publish a site that's pinned to HiveRelay before you finish reading this sentence.