Offline Behavior
What still works without a connection, what happens to a session across a restart, and how TabSlate reconnects.
What works without a connection
TabSlate is local-first: browsing workspaces, saving bookmarks, creating collections, and managing tabs and groups all read from and write to data already on the device, online or not. Being offline doesn't lock the dashboard or make it read-only, for a guest or a signed-in account alike.
For a synced account, changes you make while offline are saved locally right away and queued to push once a connection returns — they aren't lost, just not yet synced. The sidebar's sync status shows Offline while there's no reachable connection, in place of its usual idle/syncing/error states.
Sessions across a browser restart
Closing and reopening the browser doesn't sign you out. TabSlate holds onto your session and refreshes it in the background automatically; you may briefly see Offline in the sync status while that refresh is in flight, or for as long as it keeps failing because there's no connection yet.
If a refresh fails for a reason other than connectivity — the session has actually expired or been revoked — TabSlate signs you out and clears local data the same way a manual logout does, rather than continuing to retry indefinitely. See Guest and Verified Accounts for what logging out clears.
Reconnecting
TabSlate retries automatically once a connection is available again, waiting longer between attempts each time it fails rather than retrying constantly — you don't need to trigger this yourself, though Sync now forces an immediate attempt if you'd rather not wait. Some permanent-deletion actions specifically require a live connection and are blocked while offline instead of being applied locally; see Cloud Sync for that case.
Last updated on