The hardest part of trying a new browser isn't the browser. It's everything you'd leave behind — the bookmarks you've collected for years, the passwords you couldn't type from memory if you tried, the mailing address you've entered into a thousand checkout forms.
So 0.13.0 is about making the switch painless. Chervil now imports your stuff from Chrome, Edge, Brave, and Vivaldi — bookmarks, history, saved passwords, and address autofill. And while we were in there, we reorganized the Library so it finally matches how you actually think about what's in it.
Bring everything over
It all lives in one place: Settings → Browser → Import from another browser. Every bit of it is read-only — Chervil never touches your other browser's data — and it all runs on your machine. Nothing is uploaded.
Bookmarks → Favorites. Pick a browser profile and your bookmarks come straight in, folders and all. In Chervil, saved websites are Favorites (more on that below), so that's where they land. Re-run it anytime — duplicates are skipped.
History. Your recent browsing history imports into the History tab, so the sites you keep coming back to are already there when you start typing in the address bar.
Address & contact autofill. One click fills your Chervil autofill identity — name, email, phone, street address — from a saved address in your old browser, so form-filling on real sites just works.
Passwords, the honest way
Passwords deserve their own paragraph, because there's a real story here.
The tempting shortcut is to read the browser's password database directly. We looked into it — and on a modern Chrome, it's a dead end. Chrome now wraps its saved passwords in app-bound encryption, tied to the browser itself, specifically so other programs can't read them. That's a good security decision, and working around it isn't something an honest browser should ship.
So Chervil does it the way every serious password manager does: from a CSV export. In your old browser, open Settings → Passwords → Export passwords; in Chervil, choose that file under Import passwords…. It's not only the safe path — it's the complete one. Because your browser decrypts the passwords for the export, you get all of them, not just the subset an older format could crack.
And they're handled carefully. The file is read and saved entirely inside Chervil's core process — the plaintext never reaches the on-screen part of the app, and Sprig never sees it. Everything lands in the same encrypted, passphrase-locked vault as any login you'd save by hand. (When you're done, delete the CSV — it's an unencrypted copy of your passwords sitting on your disk.)
A Library that finally makes sense
If you've used Chervil, you know it keeps two very different kinds of things: websites you want to get back to, and pages Sprig composes for you. The old Library blurred them together. This release pulls them apart.
- Favorites are your favorite websites — the ★ star, just like a normal browser. They have folders, collapsible sections, a one-click Collapse/Expand all, and an optional favorites bar under the address bar. This is where your imported bookmarks live.
- Saved Pages are the Chervil pages you compose and want to keep. They're organized into Spaces, with Synthesize and Publish for a whole Space right there.
Two more renames fell out of that, and both make the tabs read like a browser you already understand:
- "Sites" is now "History" — it was always your web browsing history; now it's named like one.
- The old composed-pages "History" tab is now "Activity" — a flat, automatic timeline of everything you've made.
Anything you'd previously saved as a website (or just imported) moves into Favorites automatically, so you don't have to reorganize a thing.
Deletes that stay deleted
Here's a bug that only bites if you run Chervil on more than one computer — but if you do, it was a real annoyance. Chervil can sync your data through a folder your cloud already keeps in step (OneDrive, Drive, Dropbox). The catch: deleting a page, a site-visit, an agent, or a schedule on one machine could quietly come back the next time the folder synced from another one.
0.13.0 fixes it. Deletions now leave a small tombstone that travels with your data, so a delete on one computer stays deleted everywhere — the same trick bookmarks already used, now applied across the board (and hardened against a few edge cases we found in review, like re-adding something the instant after deleting it).
The small stuff that adds up
- "Chervil Chat" in the browser extension. Right-click a page or a selection and pick Chervil Chat to just ask Sprig about it in a conversation — no page composed, just an answer.
- Links in chat are clickable. When Sprig drops a URL into a reply, click it — it opens in a new tab instead of making you copy-paste.
- Your fill buttons, your call. The 💳 card and 🔑 login buttons on the address bar are now part of Toolbar Options, so you can show or hide them like any other button.
- A dedicated Browser settings page now gathers Browsing & privacy and Import in one spot.
Get it
Chervil is free and open source. Download the latest for Windows →, or read the full 0.13.0 changelog.
If you've been meaning to give an AI-first browser a real try but couldn't face rebuilding your bookmarks and passwords from scratch — this is the release that says you don't have to. Bring it all with you.