18 September 2026

Install it, and it works without a network

Chrome, Edge and Safari now offer to install TransformPipe as an app — its own window, its own icon, no address bar. Opened with no connection it still starts and still converts: every conversion runs in the browser anyway. Documents on the account need the network, as they always did.

Most web apps that install are a shortcut with extra steps: the window is different and the offline behaviour is a spinner. This one is the opposite case — the thing that needed the network was never the conversion, it was fetching the page.

Why it works with no connection

Every conversion here has always run in the browser — the Markdown parser, the HTML reader, the .docx and .xlsx readers, the zip reader for a Notion or Obsidian export. None of them ever needed a server, which is the same reason nothing you convert is uploaded. Installing simply removes the last thing that needed the network: fetching the page itself.

So an installed copy opened on a plane, on a train, or on a locked-down machine starts, accepts a file, converts it, and downloads the result. A page you visited before is cached at its own address, so the documentation and the articles you have read are there too.

What still needs the network

Anything that involves the account: the saved document list, saving, sharing, the AI summary, and signing in. Those are asked for the moment you use them, and say so plainly when there is no connection rather than hanging.

Nothing about the account's data is cached — /api is never stored, and neither is a shared document at /s/. A cache that held somebody's documents on a shared machine would be a worse bargain than a slower page.

It changes nothing if you do not install it

The site is the same site. Installing is an option the browser offers once the page says it is installable; ignoring it costs nothing, and uninstalling leaves no trace beyond the browser's own cache.