AriCore v0.3 + v0.3.1 — Browse with Ari, weather, and five new themes

The headline change in this release is that AriCore got a browser of its own. Not a wrapper around Safari, not a list of links you tap to leave the app — a full visible browser that lives inside Solo mode, with Ari sitting beside the page like a copilot. You read what you're reading; Ari reads it too. You ask it to summarise, extract a number, fill a form, click a button. It does, with your tap-to-approve, and you watch.

That feature shipped as Browse with Ari in v0.3. Then v0.3.1 stacked weather visuals onto Solar Hours, added five new theme palettes, made the autonomous browsing flow substantially faster, and made chats survive being backgrounded by iOS. Both versions ship together this month — here's what they bring.

Browse with Ari

Open the app, tap Browse on the bottom bar — a new Solo-mode tab between Models and Providers. You land on a configurable homepage (DuckDuckGo by default, or whatever you pick). It's a real browser: typed URLs go to real sites, links open, forms submit, JavaScript runs, sessions persist. Ad blocking is on by default — about 150 hand-curated ad/tracker/consent-wall hosts blocked at the network layer so the page renders the way it was meant to.

The chrome is thin. URL bar at the top with back/forward/reload/home/menu. A small Tabs button in the top-left opens the tab switcher (grid view, recently-closed undo). A floating Ari orb in the bottom-right is a chat surface — tap it and the chat panel slides up; tap the chevron to slide it back down.

The orb is a small sun-disc circle with a soft corona that pulses while Ari is mid-turn. When it replies, the latest message peeks beside the orb for a few seconds, then fades — so you can keep your eyes on the page without missing the answer. If Ari wants to act on the page, an inline approval card appears above the orb with the steps it's about to take and Allow / Deny buttons. You don't have to open the chat.

Each tab has its own conversation. Open three tabs and you have three independent threads with Ari, each scoped to the page that tab is on. The conversation only lands in your THREADS list once you actually talk to it — opening tabs doesn't pollute the list with empty drafts.

Talking to it about a page

The simplest thing is just asking. "What is this article actually saying?" Ari reads the page (via a tool call you'll see appear inline), summarises in three or four sentences, and offers to pull more if you want.

One-tap shortcuts in the menu cover the common cases:

• Summarise this page — drops a short request in and sends.
• Compare open tabs — synthesises what's on each tab side-by-side. Useful when you're researching a decision and have three product pages, two reviews, and a Reddit thread open.
• Remember this page — Ari reads it, commits a one-or-two-sentence note to its memory, and surfaces it later when relevant.

Acting on the page

The bigger move is letting Ari do something. "Add the cheapest Flipper Zero from currys.co.uk to my basket." Ari calls a planning tool that silently navigates to the page in your tab and reads the real interactive elements (forms, inputs, buttons, with their actual CSS selectors). Then it composes a single batch of actions — navigate, click search, fill query, submit, click product, click add-to-basket — and asks you to approve.

You read the steps in plain English on the approval card, tap Allow, and watch the page drive itself: each element gets a brief highlight before it's clicked or filled, the navigation lands, the basket updates. You can tap Stop at any point and it halts immediately, even mid-batch.

Privacy posture is still the same as v0.2's web tools: only domains on your allowlist are reachable, and a permanent block list refuses banking, healthcare, government, identity, Apple services, and adult sites no matter what. The model can't override either gate.

The boring browser stuff that's also in

Browse with Ari isn't just an AI surface — it's a daily-driver browser. Everything you'd want from a real one is there: tabs that persist across launches, history with substring search, bookmarks (with optional notes Ari can read so it knows why a page is bookmarked), recently-closed-tab undo, find-on-page with prev/next/match-count, pull-to-refresh, long-press-link-to-open-in-new-tab, address-bar autocomplete from your bookmarks and history, configurable homepage, configurable search engine (DuckDuckGo, Google, Bing, Brave, Kagi, Ecosia, Startpage), reader mode that strips ads and sidebars to show just the article, private (incognito) tabs with a non-persistent cookie store, optional HTTPS-only enforcement with a friendly blocked-page when triggered, and a one-tap "clear all browsing data" that wipes history, recently closed tabs, and Apple's WKWebsiteDataStore.

Solar Hours grew weather

If you own the Solar Hours cosmetic, you already had a sun and a moon crossfading on the masthead, with a starfield and the rare shooting star at night. v0.3.1 adds the daytime side of the metaphor: weather.

Drifting cloud outlines move left-to-right across the masthead, looping around when they hit the right edge. The visual treatment depends on what's actually happening outside (Open-Meteo, no API key, no account):

• Clear — just the sun, as before.
• Partly cloudy / cloudy — three drifting cloud-outline silhouettes, density scales with the cover.
• Rain — sparse angled streaks falling diagonally, gated to the visible band so they don't draw under the Dynamic Island.
• Snow — slow-falling outlined dots with subtle sideways drift.
• Fog — three faint horizontal capsule outlines drifting laterally.
• Thunder — rain plus an occasional brief accent-tinted flash.

Everything is gated by the daylight envelope so it crossfades out at dusk and the starfield takes over. No conflict between weather and night sky — they share the same surface and hand off to each other.

Five new theme palettes

The IAP theme lineup doubled. Where v0.2 had Slate, Vellum, and Ink as paid palettes alongside the free Paper and Midnight, v0.3.1 adds:

• Linotype — saturated cornflower / cyanotype blue ground with deep press-ink-blue primary and copper-rust desk. Hot-metal type-shop palette.
• Foxglove — saturated lilac with vivid magenta-purple primary. Deep-bloom garden, the letter-writing room.
• Verdigris — saturated jade with vivid tropical teal-green primary and rust desk. Glasshouse rooms.
• Crow — saturated brick-blood ground with pure white text and pure black accents. Three colours total — cinema-poster aesthetic.
• Manuscript — saturated honey amber with deep aubergine purpura primary, lapis-blue cool, and gold-leaf desk. Imperial illumination.

Each new palette has its own bespoke Solar Hours arc — the bg, accent, desk, and cool tokens all shift through pre-dawn, morning, noon, evening, and dusk, tuned to the palette's identity. Linotype's cornflower deepens to navy at midnight; Manuscript's gold leaf goes molten in evening light; Crow's blood-red darkens to burgundy after sundown.

Five palettes is enough range that the lineup now spans real territory: warm-cream editorial (Paper, Vellum), cool-grey editorial (Slate, Ink), saturated-colour density (Foxglove, Verdigris, Manuscript, Crow), industrial blueprint (Linotype), dark (Midnight).

Faster autonomous browsing

The first version of web_act was correct but slow — the model would guess CSS selectors blind, half of them wouldn't match, it'd retry. A simple "fill in this form and submit" could take 30-60 seconds across multiple round trips.

v0.3.1 introduces a plan-then-act flow:

• A new web_plan(url) tool silently navigates to a URL in the user's active tab and returns the real interactive-elements list (forms, inputs, buttons + their CSS selectors). No approval, no body text dump, fast — same posture as current_page_read.
• The system prompt now nudges Ari: before web_act on a page it hasn't seen this turn, call web_plan first.
• Per-step snapshots inside a batch are gone — only one snapshot at the end of the batch (the only one the model ever sees). Saves ~150-300ms per intermediate step.
• Highlight pauses tightened from 550ms to 250ms; post-navigate settle from 600ms to 350ms; click and submit settles trimmed too.
• If web_act includes a navigate step to a URL that's already loaded, the navigation is skipped entirely (saves the network round trip).

End result: a typical "find a product, click it, add to cart" flow now lands in 5-10 seconds instead of 30-60.

Chats survive backgrounding

Pre-v0.3.1, switching apps mid-turn would freeze Ari's reply mid-sentence — iOS suspends the app, the model stream pauses, the WebView pauses, and you'd come back to a half-finished thought. Now we wrap each turn (and each web_act batch) in a UIApplication background-execution window so it keeps running through iOS's ~30-second grace period. Switch to Mail to grab a number Ari needs, switch back, the answer's waiting.

Smaller things that add up

• Per-persona memory. v0.3 moved memory off a single global bank onto each persona individually. Different personas know different things about you — your work persona knows your colleagues; your home persona doesn't have to.
• The collapsing threads list. Long histories don't dominate the home screen anymore. Latest five conversations show by default; a "+ N more" pill expands the rest with a soft animation.
• Ari knows about your tabs. The system-prompt addendum now lists every open tab (title + URL) and every bookmark (with notes), so Ari can suggest "you also had X open" or "your saved-for-later page on Y is relevant" without a tool call.
• History is searchable by Ari. A browse_history_search tool lets it find pages you saw last week — "that recipe I had last Tuesday" resolves to the actual URL.

What's next

v0.3.1 is in review. The next milestone (0.4) is voice — push-to-talk, speech recognition on-device via Apple's Speech framework, AVSpeechSynthesizer for the reply, voice-first composer state. Ari is most useful as the assistant you reach for on a walk, in the kitchen, or in the car; voice is the next big lever for actually using it that way.

After voice: Lock-Screen Live Activities for in-flight watchers, briefings, and web_act batches.