Chervil exists to replace the ritual you don't even notice anymore: type a question into a search box, get ten blue links, open six tabs, and stitch the answer together yourself. Chervil's whole bet is that the browser should just bring you the answer — a real page, built from the live web.
0.19.1 is the release where that bet gets serious. It goes after the three things a search engine still makes you do by hand — compare options, judge whether to trust a result, and come back later to check if anything changed — and does them for you. (There's also some welcome quality-of-life at the end: a toolbar that stops hiding, and a window you can size to fit you.)
Compare anything, side by side
This is the one people are going to use every day. Ask Chervil to compare two things:
iPhone 16 vs Pixel 9
…and instead of a wall of text, Sprig researches the live web and builds a comparison table. Your options are the columns. The factors that actually drive the decision — price, battery, camera, that one spec you care about — are the rows. The winner of each row is flagged. At the top there's a bottom-line verdict, and a "best for…" guide that matches each option to the kind of person it suits.
Every cell is grounded in a real source, not the model's memory — so the price is the price, the specs are the specs. Click a column header to focus on one option, or flip on Differences only to hide the rows where everything's the same and see just what sets them apart.
It works on anything you'd normally open a pile of tabs for: two phones, two frameworks, two towns to move to, two strollers. Type a plain X vs Y, hit the new ⚖️ button by the composer, or use /compare ….
Every claim, cited — and dated
The knock on AI answers has always been the same: how do I know it's true, and how do I know it's current? 0.19.1 answers both, right on the page.
When Sprig uses the web to compose a page, the specific claims it pulls from a source now carry a small inline citation — a numbered chip you can click straight to the source, with a matching numbered Sources list at the bottom. No more wondering which line came from where.
And the Sources panel now shows freshness: a recency badge on each source and a one-line summary like "Freshest source 2 days ago · 4 of 6 dated." At a glance you can tell whether an answer is built on this week's reporting or something from three years ago. If a page answered from the model's own knowledge without searching, the panel says so — your cue to run Verify.
Trust stops being a leap of faith and becomes something you can see.
Watchers — Chervil keeps an eye out
Some questions aren't "what's the answer right now" — they're "tell me when the answer changes." That used to mean bookmarking a page and remembering to check it. Not anymore.
On any live site, just ask:
watch this page and let me know when it's back in stock
tell me when the price drops below $500
ping me when the docs update
Chervil sets up a watcher — it checks the page in the background on a schedule and sends you a notification the moment your condition is met. Click the alert and it opens the page. You can also add one by hand from the new ⏰ Schedules & watchers panel with a URL and a condition, and pause, check, or delete watchers there any time. They run while Chervil sits in your tray and sync across your machines.
It's the browser doing the boring, patient work you'd never actually get around to.
Refine a page without leaving it
Composed pages have always been refinable — but you had to go back up to the composer to do it. Now every composed page has a follow-up box right in its action bar. Reading the page and want it tighter? Type "make it shorter." Want it to zero in on one thing? "focus on the budget options." "add a section on X." Sprig rewrites the page you're looking at, in place, without losing your spot.
And the toolbar stops hiding
A small but real fix: when the Chervil window wasn't maximized, the toolbar ran out of room and quietly pushed its right-most buttons — Settings, Print, Zoom — off the edge of the screen, where you couldn't reach them without maximizing. Now, when space runs short, those buttons collapse into a ⋯ More menu that appears only when it's needed. Every action stays one click away at any window size. (The Toolbar buttons picker in Settings also got a tidier two-column layout.)
Size the app to fit you
Chervil's chrome is now yours to resize. Grab the seam on the right edge of the chat sidebar and drag it to whatever width suits you — wider when you're deep in a back-and-forth with Sprig, narrower when you want the page to have the floor. In vertical-tabs layout, the tab rail resizes exactly the same way, so you can give long tab titles room to breathe or tuck the rail down to a slim strip.
Double-click a seam to snap it back to the default. Your sizes are remembered and follow you across your machines. And if you drag the sidebar all the way in, it just tucks closed — the same as Ctrl+\ — so one gesture takes you from a wide chat panel to a full-width page.
0.19.1 is Chervil doing more of the search engine's job so you do less of it: comparing your options, showing its work, and keeping watch for you — in a window that finally fits the way you work. As always, Chervil is free and open source — grab the latest build and put "iPhone 16 vs Pixel 9" in the bar.