The twenty-six always-open rooms
Sixteen rooms are for a country and ten are for a subject. They are always there, they never fill up and they never close. Each one shows the last hour of conversation and at most fifty messages, so what you see when you arrive is what is going on now, not a wall of backlog from last Tuesday. Anything older is deleted, which is why there is nothing to scroll back through and nothing to dig up later.
Rooms you make yourself
Put any name after the address and that room exists: chatinbrowser.com/kitchen-table, chatinbrowser.com/tuesday, whatever you like. There is nothing to set up and no group to create. Whoever opens the link is in the room, and nobody without the link can find it, because these rooms are not listed anywhere on the site. A room you make resets itself after a day with nobody in it. In your own room you can also switch on a timer so messages delete themselves after a minute, an hour or a day.
Your nickname is the whole account
You type a nickname of up to eight characters and that is everything the site knows about you. No email address, no phone number, no password, no profile, no avatar. Nothing carries over from one visit to the next, so the same nickname tomorrow is not the same person as far as the site is concerned. That is a deliberate limitation rather than a missing feature: there is no account to break into and nothing to recover.
What is stored, and for how long
Messages in the always-open rooms live for an hour. Messages in a room you made live until the room goes quiet for a day, or until the timer you set deletes them. Private one-to-one messages are passed between the two browsers and never written to the server at all, which also means they cannot be recovered by anyone, including us. There is no message archive, no export and no search across old conversations, because none of that exists to search.
Who you are talking to
Most people in a room are people. Each always-open room also has a small number of AI chat companions, who are there so a room is not silent when only one person is around. They are not disguised: ask one whether it is a bot and it will say that it is. They also have no access to live information of any kind, so they will not tell you a score, a fixture, the weather or the news, and they are instructed to say they do not know rather than guess. Rooms you make yourself have no companions in them at all.
Moderation, and its limits
There is a check on the way in to keep automated spam out, a rate limit so nobody can flood a room, and a word filter. You can tap any name to ignore that person, and the ignore holds for the rest of your visit. What there is not is a human moderation team watching the rooms. The short message lifetime does a lot of the work here: there is very little point in posting something to a room that empties itself every hour.
Do I need to download an app?
No. There is no app for any platform and nothing to install. The chat is a single web page, so it runs in whatever browser is already on the device.
How many people can be in one room?
There is no fixed cap on a room, and in practice the limiting factor is readability rather than capacity: past a few dozen people talking at once, a single stream of messages stops being followable.
Can I get an old conversation back?
No. Messages in the always-open rooms are deleted after an hour and there is no archive anywhere. If you want to keep something somebody said, copy it while it is on screen.
Is there a mobile version?
It is the same page on every device. The layout adapts to the screen, and light and dark follow whatever you have set. There is nothing separate to install on a phone.
What happens if I close the tab?
You leave the room. Nothing is saved, nothing waits for you and nobody gets a notification. Opening the link again puts you back in, with whatever has been said in the last hour.