When I launch Blockstack browser, it just opens a new tab in Chrome. Is Blockstack “Browser” actually an add-on? Or a background process? And how do I tell if a given Chrome tab is using blockstack features or not?
I’m confused because the things that seem like the most absolutely obvious questions don’t seem to be addressed anywhere. What am I missing?
Hey @Nahath,
It’s a background process 
Two processes, technically–one that implements a node.js web server that serves you the UI, and one that implements the blockstack API server locally. The latter one is a RESTful API for interacting with your backend storage services (e.g. local disk, dropbox, Azure blob storage, Gaia hubs).
The API daemon, in turn, interacts with a remote indexer process (at node.blockstack.org) and a Bitcoin daemon (bitcoin.blockstack.com). We supply publicly-running nodes to make onboarding easier, but power users are free to run them locally and point their browser to them in the “settings” panel.
More details here, if you’re interested
Okay, so if I have some browser windows open and I launch the blockstack browser exe, is every browser window going to be sending its requests through a blockstack path or just the window that opened when I launched the exe?