Using Co-browse

The side panel is the main chat surface, modeled after Zo's own conversation UI: composer-shell user bubbles with mention pills, bare assistant prose, inline thinking, tool-trace action cards, and a per-turn footer with Copy / mode / model / time / feedback controls.

The chat surface

• Composer — type a query; the Send button stays disabled until you type something.
• Starter chips — a fresh chat shows four clickable starting points (summarize, !context peek, extract links, research) that prefill the composer; the card retires itself on the first message.
• Assistant messages — rendered as escaped Markdown (nothing is injected as raw HTML); fenced code blocks get a Copy button.
• Thinking — when Zo returns a reasoning field alongside actions, it renders as muted inline prose for short reasoning, or collapses into a "💭 Thought" trace for longer reasoning.
• Action cards — browser actions surface as a grouped, sticky timeline with per-action status (pending → running → done).
• Per-turn footer — Copy, mode, model, timestamp (relative), feedback, and a context-tier chip (🔗 URL only / 📝 Text / 🧩 Elements / 📷 Screenshot) showing exactly how much page context that turn sent — hover for the policy's reason.
• 📷 Image toggle — the chip at the end of the tab strip (next to the composer) arms one turn with a page screenshot: no !context prefix, no mode hunting. Arming flips the MODE dropdown to Visual (unchecking before you send restores it); the next send attaches the screenshot — and a 📷 Screenshot pill on your message — then the toggle switches itself off. The capture is honest: if it fails for any reason (the selected model can't take images, screenshots are disabled in settings, or the page can't be captured), an inline warning tells you and the turn goes out as text-only — the pill and Zo's footer 📷 chip only ever show when pixels really shipped.
• ⬇ Latest pill — appears when the chat log is scrolled away from the bottom; click to snap back.
• Cancel — press Esc while Zo is responding to interrupt the stream.

Bang commands

Type ! in the composer to trigger quick commands. !help lists them inline:

Command	Description
!summarize	Condense the page into a concise summary
!extract [what]	Extract structured data (tables, lists, contacts, prices)
!research [topic]	Deep research on the page topic
!ask [question]	Answer a specific question about the page
!fill [details]	Ask Zo to fill editable fields on the page
!skills	List available Zo skills
!skill <name>	Run a Zo skill on the current page
!autos	List your scheduled Zo automations
!save [path]	Save this page to your Zo workspace as Markdown
!query <question>	Natural-language DuckDB query against your datasets
!auto <instruction>	Create a scheduled Zo automation from the current page
!help	Show this list

Mode commands (!summarize, !extract, !research, !ask) set the active Mode for a single turn — !summarize and !research run in Ask since the 2026-08 rationalization merged those modes in. Others (!skill, !query, !auto) open Zo's tooling directly.

Reference pickers: / skills, % files, @ tabs

The composer has three trigger characters that attach references to your next message:

Trigger	Picks from	Rides along as
/	Your Zo skills (/home/workspace/Skills)	A ## Skills to Run section — Zo reads each skill's SKILL.md server-side and runs it as part of the turn
%	Your Zo workspace files (browsable tree)	A ## Referenced Files manifest — paths only; Zo reads content with its own file tools when needed
@	Open tabs in this window	A ## Referenced Tabs manifest + short excerpts (full content via read_tab)

• Type the trigger at the start of a token (after a space), then filter by typing: /web filters skills, %readme filters the current folder.
• Arrow keys move, Enter/Tab selects, Esc closes. In the % picker, folder rows navigate (and ⬆ .. climbs); file rows attach.
• Selected entries arm chips above the composer (⚡ skills, 📄 files) — click a chip's ✕ to remove it. Chips are send-once: they ride the next message only, then clear (a skill is an invocation, not a sticky setting).
• The live prompt inspector preview shows the exact sections that will be sent before you hit Send.

Skills and files are enumerated over Zo's MCP server (/mcp) with your saved access token — no extra setup. The skills list is cached ~5 minutes per panel session; directory listings ~1 minute. Paths in the % picker are confined to /home/workspace — traversal outside it is rejected before any request is made.

Right-click context menu

Enabled menus are configured in Options. Right-click a page, a selection, a link, or an editable field to run quick actions without opening the panel:

• Page actions — summarize, extract, and more
• Selection actions — ask Zo about the selected text
• Link actions — ask Zo about a link
• Editable — "Fill this field"

Each menu entry can be toggled on/off in Options → Enabled menus.

Theming

The panel supports the Zo-native themes: system, light, dark, sepia, forest, and ocean. Use the theme toggle to cycle, or let it follow prefers-color-scheme. Your theme is persisted across sessions.

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+Shift+Z (⌘⇧Z)	Open the side panel
Ctrl+Shift+S (⌘⇧S)	Summarize the current page
Ctrl+Shift+N (⌘⇧N)	Start a new chat
Ctrl+Shift+E (⌘⇧E)	Extract structured data from this page

Omnibox

Type zo in the address bar and hit space to run commands from the omnibox (e.g. zo summarize this page).

Context capture

When you ask a question, the extension captures page context from the active tab at a tier determined by the active mode:

Tier	What's sent
0 — Pointer	URL, title, viewport only
1 — Text	+ visible text (sliced to the mode's text budget)
2 — Elements	+ compact clickable + form-field list with selectors
3 — Screenshot	+ a page screenshot

Co-browse (the default) runs at tier 2, so Zo gets clickable elements and form fields with selectors to act on. The Visual mode runs at tier 3. See Modes for the full mapping.

Want pixels on a specific turn? Arm the 📷 Image toggle by the composer (it flips the Mode to Visual and forces tier 3 for that one send) or type !context <question> in Visual mode.

Follow-ups are cheap by design. Within a conversation, full context is attached at most once per stable page — same-page follow-ups send the URL/title pointer only and rely on Zo's conversation threading. Every assistant footer's context-tier chip shows what the turn actually sent (hover for the reason), and the prompt inspector previews the exact prompt before you send. If a stream died before Zo's thread was established, the next action turn re-attaches full context automatically — a fresh thread holds nothing.

Referenced tabs follow the same send-once rule: a tab's 500-char excerpt is billed once; unchanged pages ride as a pointer line ("already provided above") on later turns.

Conversation history

• Several chats stay open at once as chat tabs above the composer (≤8, LRU evicted; a pulsing dot marks a backgrounded chat that's still streaming). Each chat has its own Zo thread and its own context-dedup state.
• History (☰) lists past conversations grouped by date with a one-line preview snippet of each chat's opening ask, live search with match highlighting, ✎ inline rename, and ✕ delete (with confirmation).
• Chat history is stored locally in chrome.storage.local (cobrowse_convos, capped at 50 messages per chat) for continuity.
• Zo's conversation_id is tracked per chat and sent on every /zo/ask call so the thread continues on Zo's side too.
• New Chat (✚) starts a fresh chat: new Zo thread, fresh context state — previous chats stay in History.

Error handling

When a stream is interrupted, Zo Co-browse shows a "Response interrupted" card with a Retry button — the extension retries only transient errors and never silently drops the answer. See Streaming for the full resilience design.