JahBrowser

A crash‑resistant, Chromium‑based Windows browser built for Kick viewers and streamers.

Latest version · Windows 10/11 · All releases

Why doesn't it crash? · Why is it fast? · Features · Build · Security

English · Türkçe

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What is it?

JahBrowser is an open‑source, Chromium‑152‑based Windows browser designed for Kick viewers and streamers. Familiar like Chrome, but built for watching live streams — faster and snappier than a stock Chromium, and engineered so a crash never interrupts your stream.

• Fast & snappy — instant new tabs, instant tab switching, no AI bloat (explained below).
• Crash‑resistant — even if a tab crashes, your stream keeps going (explained below).
• No‑plugin emote engine — 7TV / BTTV / FFZ / Kick emotes render directly in chat.
• Engine‑level ad blocking (Balta) — ~93,000 ad/tracker domains + YouTube ad‑skip + cosmetic filtering.
• Live side panel — the Kick channels you follow in one place, with real live data.
• Per‑site volume booster (0–500%) + loudness normalization, multistream, streamer mode, native Kick mod tools.

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🛡️ Why doesn't it crash or close?

This is JahBrowser's single most important difference. The short answer: it keeps Chromium's rock‑solid multi‑process core and adds a whole‑browser recovery + protection layer — so nothing interrupts your stream, and if something does die it comes right back.

There are two different problems here, and most "crash recovery" only handles the first:

• A single tab crashes → the classic "Aw, Snap!" page.
• The whole browser freezes, closes itself, or vanishes → everything is gone. This is the one that hurts during a long stream, and the one most tools ignore.

JahBrowser handles both. Here is each real problem and exactly how it's solved:

Problem: a tab crashes ("Aw, Snap!")

Solution — invisible tab recovery. If a tab's renderer process crashes, JahBrowser reloads it automatically in a fresh process instead of showing an error page — usually it's back before you notice.

• Stream tabs (kick.com) recover fastest (~50 ms); other tabs ~400 ms.
• Only genuine crashes are recovered; tabs you closed or that were evicted to save memory are never reloaded by mistake.
• Infinite‑loop protection: a page that keeps crashing backs off (1 s → 3 s → 10 s) and eventually shows the error page — a broken site can't lock the browser.
• Form safety: POST pages are never silently re‑submitted.

Problem: the whole browser crashes or closes itself

Solution — automatic relaunch + session restore. When the entire browser process dies, JahBrowser tells Windows to relaunch it and reopen your last tabs (--restore-last-session). Usually you're back within seconds, with your streams. A built‑in guard (Windows won't relaunch an app that ran < 60 s) prevents a start‑up‑crash loop.

Problem: the browser freezes / stops responding

Solution — the same relaunch path covers hangs. If the UI thread hangs and Windows kills the "not responding" window, it is relaunched into your previous session too. Your open tabs are continuously saved, so almost nothing is lost.

Problem: video freezes or goes black (GPU / driver)

This is the #1 cause of freezes while watching — a flaky graphics driver. Solution, three layers:

1. Software fallback — if hardware video decode fails, video drops to software decoding and keeps playing instead of going black (proprietary_codecs + ffmpeg_branding="Chrome" compiled together).
2. Self‑healing safe‑GPU ladder — if the GPU keeps crashing, JahBrowser remembers it for that machine and starts up in a progressively safer video path next launch (DirectComposition off → hardware video decode off). When your driver is fixed, it gradually restores full acceleration.
3. One‑click Safe Video Mode — in Control Center; forces the safe path immediately if video misbehaves.

The risky flags that would break Chromium's GPU safety ladder (--ignore-gpu-blocklist, --disable-gpu-watchdog, …) are never shipped.

Problem: long sessions eat all your RAM (out‑of‑memory)

Solution — memory management that protects the stream. For multi‑hour sessions, Long Stream Mode manages memory aggressively so idle background tabs free their RAM — but stream tabs (kick.com) are never discarded or frozen (kJahStreamSite). No matter how many tabs you open, the stream keeps playing. (For everyday use the browser keeps every tab live so switching between them is instant.)

Bonus: it learns from crashes

An opt‑in, local‑only crash log (off by default, KVKK‑friendly, nothing uploaded) records the GPU/driver behind a crash, so the hardware combos that cause freezes can actually be fixed.

In short: same Chromium stability + invisible tab recovery + whole‑browser auto‑relaunch + a self‑healing GPU path + stream‑protected memory = your stream is never interrupted, and if the browser ever dies it comes straight back.

Honest note: many of these freezes are caused by your GPU driver / hardware / Windows itself — no browser can prevent a broken driver from misbehaving. JahBrowser's job is to reduce the triggers, recover invisibly, come back in seconds if it dies, and give you easy escape hatches.

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⚡ Why is it fast?

Stability is only half of it — JahBrowser is also tuned to feel quicker and snappier than a stock Chromium/Chrome, especially on a machine with plenty of RAM. Nothing risky is turned on; these are all about doing less work and not waiting on things you don't need to wait for.

• Instant new tab. The custom new tab page shows real live Kick data, but it no longer blocks the tab on network requests — the newest data is served from an in‑memory cache and refreshed in the background. In practice the first tab after launch fills in within a moment, and every new tab after that opens in ~15 ms instead of waiting on the network.
• Instant tab switching. On a machine with enough RAM there's no reason to throw idle tabs out of memory — so JahBrowser keeps them live by default. Switching back to a background tab is immediate, with no reload. (Multi‑hour, low‑RAM sessions can still opt into aggressive memory management via Long Stream Mode.)
• No AI bloat. Every heavyweight AI subsystem that ships in modern Chrome — Gemini/assistant, the AI Mode omnibox, Lens overlay, on‑device model execution, page‑content annotation, Compose — is compiled out / disabled. That's a lot of background work and memory that simply isn't there.
• Engine‑level ad blocking. Ads and trackers are the single biggest thing slowing normal browsing down. Blocking ~93,000 ad/tracker domains at the network layer (Balta) means pages load with far less to download, parse, and run.
• Lower background overhead. JahBrowser's own extras stay out of the way — e.g. the volume booster only starts watching a page once you actually use it, so ordinary browsing and scrolling carry no extra cost.
• Startup & load tuning. Speed‑oriented Chromium flags are on (threaded HTML body loading, resource preloading, font‑lookup prefetch, spare‑renderer priority) so cold starts and page loads stay tight.

The net effect: new tabs and tab switches feel instant, streaming pages stay smooth, and there's less invisible machinery competing for your CPU and memory than in a stock browser.

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✨ Features

Area	Feature
Speed	Instant new tab (cached live data, no network block) · instant tab switching (tabs stay live) · no AI bloat (Gemini/Lens/on‑device models compiled out) · engine‑level ad blocking · startup/load flag tuning
Stability	Whole‑browser auto‑relaunch (crash + hang) · tab crash recovery · self‑healing safe‑GPU ladder + Safe Video Mode · stream‑tab keep‑alive · Long Stream Mode · opt‑in local crash log
Streaming	Live side panel (real Kick data + avatars) · multistream grid · go‑live desktop notification · Theater (fullscreen) mode
Chat / Emotes	No‑plugin 7TV/BTTV/FFZ/Kick emote rendering · emote picker + menu · keyword highlight + mention sound · message history
Kick mod tools	Native mod panel (chatter roster + user‑card · link/spam/flood/CAPS flags · deletion detection) — 100% client‑side
Ads / Privacy	Balta adblock (~93k domains + cosmetic + YouTube ad‑skip) · DoH on · opt‑in telemetry
Sound	Per‑site volume booster 0–500% · loudness/normalize · volume mixer popup
Personalization	Custom new tab (live Kick data) · editable follow list · dark mode · search shortcuts · bilingual (EN/TR)

Detailed usage guides live in docs/kullanim/.

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⬇️ Download & verify

1. From the Releases page, download JahBrowser-Setup.exe (installer) and run it.
2. The browser starts in English by default; you can switch to Turkish from the Control Center.

If you see "Windows protected your PC"

JahBrowser is open source and currently an unsigned independent build. Windows SmartScreen shows this warning for any new, unsigned program that hasn't yet built up "reputation" — it does not mean the file is a virus. To continue: "More info" → "Run anyway".

You don't have to take our word for it — verify:

• Each release publishes SHA256SUMS.txt so you can check your download's integrity (PowerShell: Get-FileHash .\JahBrowser-Setup.exe).
• VirusTotal scan (clean): view the live report ✅ — each release is also scanned by file hash (links in the release notes).
• All source is in this repo — you can build it yourself.

Details: SECURITY.md

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🔧 Build from source

JahBrowser does not redistribute all of Chromium. Instead it follows the ungoogled‑chromium model: patches applied on top of a clean Chromium tree.

chromium-patches/
  faz1/
    jah-browser-faz1.patch          # main change set (~94 files)
    search-engines-submodule.patch  # search-engine data (separate submodule)
    jah-release-args.gn             # distribution build args template
    tree-files/                     # complete new files that the patch adds

Summary (see chromium-patches/README.md for detail):

1. Check out a Chromium 152 source tree (base commit 47280b64e3), install depot_tools.
2. Apply the patches: git apply chromium-patches/faz1/jah-browser-faz1.patch
3. Create out/Release/args.gn from the jah-release-args.gn template. Critical: for a distribution build, proprietary_codecs=true and ffmpeg_branding="Chrome" must be set together (for video stability).
4. gn gen out/Release && autoninja -C out/Release chrome mini_installer

jah-core/ (engine‑independent product logic, TypeScript) can be tested standalone: cd jah-core && npm install && npm test.

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🔒 Privacy

• Telemetry is off by default (opt‑in).
• DoH (DNS‑over‑HTTPS) is on.
• Streamer privacy mode: designed with "what would leak if this screen were on stream?" in mind.
• Some Google services (like account sync) may not work in open‑source builds without an API key — a known Chromium behavior.

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📄 License & branding

• Code: BSD 3‑Clause — see LICENSE and NOTICE. Chromium and derived components remain under their own licenses.
• This is an independent community project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Google, Kick, 7TV, BetterTTV, or FrankerFaceZ. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.
• The "Chrome" name/logo is not used (Google trademark).

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_{Made for the Kick community ❤️ · Türkçe README}