Magnetar Guardian

Magnetar Guardian 2.1.0 Magnetar Guardian 2.1.0 is a major security, reliability, and protection-engine update. The core Guardian experience remains the same: local browser protection with category blocking, SafeSearch enforcement, PIN-protected settings, trusted allowances, and temporary guardian access. This release focuses on making those protections safer, more predictable, and more efficient. Security improvements PIN entry for blocked searches now takes place entirely on an extension-owned Guardian page rather than inside the website being viewed. This prevents webpages from accessing or interfering with the Guardian PIN interface. PIN verification has also been strengthened with serialized attempt handling, improved lockout protection, automatic invalidation of existing unlock sessions when the PIN changes, and PBKDF2-SHA256 hashing for stored PINs. Existing Guardian PINs are migrated automatically after the next successful unlock. Protection improvements Domain matching has been rebuilt to use precise domain rules, preventing unintended matches between similarly named domains. Protection rules now update atomically, avoiding temporary gaps while Guardian applies category or profile changes. Allowed sites, always-limited sites, category protection, and search protection now follow one consistent priority system. Search protection now evaluates the actual search query rather than scanning the entire URL. Guardian correctly handles encoded searches, Unicode, reordered parameters, and modern single-page navigation on supported search engines. Temporary access has also been reworked. It now uses browser-session state and session-scoped network rules, so global temporary access ends when its timer expires or the browser session ends. Performance and privacy Guardian no longer polls the browser every 30 seconds to update its badge. Status updates are now event-driven. The ruleset has also been optimized by removing more than 43,000 redundant domain rules while preserving intended protection coverage. Guardian no longer automatically stores a list of recently limited browsing domains. Aggregate local protection statistics remain available, and explicitly submitted review requests continue to be stored locally. Build and reliability improvements Guardian now includes deterministic ruleset generation, automated validation, Chrome/Firefox parity checks, package validation, and a release validation workflow. Firefox documentation has also been corrected to reflect Guardian's current Manifest V3 and declarativeNetRequest architecture. Privacy remains unchanged at its core: No analytics. No tracking. No accounts. No browsing-history upload. No cloud processing. No remote runtime code. All Guardian settings, protection state, PIN information, review requests, and statistics remain local to the browser.