Working offline: what still works when the wifi doesn't

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Where the work lives

Two designs, and every difference below follows from which one a tool picked. In the first, the work sits on a server and your browser holds a view of it, so offline means caching a copy in advance and reconciling later. In the second, the browser is where the work is written, and the server holds the copy.

Tougather is the second, and there is no account to make: the free plan has no login. What you type goes into this browser's local storage under six keys — projects, chat, team, appearance, kit and templates — with the kit's fonts and pictures in IndexedDB, a typeface being far too big for the quota those six share. Writes are coalesced for 250 ms, then flushed on pagehide and on the tab being hidden rather than on beforeunload, which some browsers ignore.

The app itself, cached

The only thing that genuinely needed a network was the app: the JavaScript that draws the editor. A service worker holds it. Navigations go to the network first with the cached shell behind them; cache-first there would pin you to a stale build until you cleared your browser. Files under /_next/static/ come from cache first, their names carrying a content hash. Three paths are cached up front — the library, the offline page, the logo — and the rest enters the cache the first time you open it online.

Requests to /api/ are never cached at all, so a row fetched for one account cannot be replayed to whoever opens the browser next. Everything through the server is therefore gone while the network is: account sync, live sessions, the hosted assistant. The local AI stub answers and says that it is local. A web manifest makes the app installable, opening standalone at the library, but there is no native build — no React Native, Capacitor, Expo, Electron or Tauri in package.json. An installed copy is the same engine minus an address bar: same storage, same ceiling.

Google, Microsoft and Notion

Google Docs, Sheets and Slides

Chrome or Edge, the Google Docs Offline extension, offline access on in Drive's settings, then mark the files. Everything offline is not the default, and what you did not mark will not open. See Google Workspace compared in full.

Microsoft 365

Which Microsoft 365 you mean decides the answer. The desktop apps were offline-first before the word existed: the file is on your disk and OneDrive reconciles when it can. The browser versions of Word and Excel are not a substitute, and a university licence usually means the desktop apps.

Notion

Yes, and better than it used to be. Recently visited pages are available automatically, and a page or a whole teamspace can be marked Available offline from its ••• menu. What you never opened and never marked will not open. The full Notion comparison covers the rest.

Side by side

What a backup file contains

One JSON file, and it is the workspace rather than a list of it: the six store payloads exactly as local storage holds them, plus the kit's fonts and pictures read back out of IndexedDB — a backup naming your typefaces without carrying them is the worst kind of half-working. It is stamped with a format marker and a version, and named for the day: tougather-2026-08-13.json.

Queued writes are flushed first, so a file taken a quarter of a second after your last edit still contains it. Restoring is destructive and therefore two steps: parsed, described back to you with a project count and an export date, applied only once you confirm. A file from a newer version is refused rather than half-read. Settings warns you separately once this origin is past 80% of its quota.

What browser storage cannot promise

The measured ceiling

Measured, not estimated: a script opens a table of N rows, types one character and times the round trip to storage. A thousand rows is 0.1 MB and opens in 0.45 s. Fifty thousand is 3.4 MB, opens in 0.56 s and puts a keystroke on screen in 118 ms. A hundred thousand rows is 6.8 MB and is refused: browser storage is full. The ceiling is the storage, not the grid — millions of rows need a different storage model, which is real work rather than a setting and is not done.

When the browser says no

A bar then appears across the top of the app and does not dismiss. It says the two useful things: the changes on screen are no longer being saved, and how large the write was that the browser turned down. It appears only on a genuine refusal, never at a percentage, because a bar that cries wolf is one people learn to scroll past. The refused value stays queued, so deleting something lets the next flush land it.

Eviction, and the sentence that matters

Browsers evict best-effort storage under pressure without telling anyone, and you find out by opening an empty library. The app asks for persistent storage, which takes this origin out of that pool: Chrome grants it silently on engagement, Firefox asks, Safari ignores the request, and Settings shows which answer you got. Even granted, it stops only automatic eviction. Clearing site data by hand still removes everything, and so do a shared laptop, a wiped machine and a stolen bag. Work held in a browser is not backed up, and no service worker changes that. There are two answers — the file above and a database — and one needs somebody to press a button. For work that runs for months, read this beside writing a thesis without a connection.

What a database changes

Two public environment variables, and the browser stops being the only place. Sync then pushes and pulls whole projects. It is not a CRDT: one project is one document and the newer timestamp wins, which is honest about what it is for — the same person on a laptop and then a phone, not two people at once. A pull never deletes a project it has not seen before, a failed pull cancels the push, and a deletion is a stored tombstone that survives having been made offline. The same variables make form answers land somewhere and switch on the audit log, withheld without a database on purpose: a log of one browser is a diary. The rest of our guides pick up from there.

Questions people ask