Put OBSCURA on your computer
Installed, OBSCURA OS opens as a desktop: full screen, with a taskbar, your files, and every application and tool in a window of its own. It has its own icon in the dock or taskbar and opens with no connection at all.
Install OBSCURA OS
Takes a couple of seconds. No account, no download folder, nothing to uninstall later except the icon itself.
Checking what this browser can do.
The desktop
Open OBSCURA OS as a desktop in this tab, to see it before you install.
The installed app opens on the OBSCURA OS desktop. Docs, Sheets, a PDF, a single tool and Files each open in a window you can move, resize, snap to a half or a quarter of the screen, minimise to the taskbar and close, and the windows you had open come back the next time it starts. In Chrome and Edge on a computer, a document double-clicked in your file manager opens in the right application, in a window on the desktop.
The desktop is part of the site, so it is free, and the Workspace in it needs no account. A Pro application opened on the desktop without a key shows its sign-in page in the window, as it does in a tab. On a phone there are no windows: the desktop is a screen of applications, and each one opens full screen.
What you get
- A real application window. No address bar, no tabs, no other sites in the way.
- It opens offline. The workspace and the tools are stored on the machine after the first visit. A handful of the heavier tools fetch a library the first time you run them, so open those once while you have a connection if you want them later.
- The same folder. If you have connected an OBSCURA OS folder, the app writes to it exactly as the site does.
- It updates itself. There is no version to chase, and you are never running an old copy while online.
- Nothing new is trusted. It is the same code from the same address, not a separate binary asking for permission to run.
If the button did nothing
Browsers each handle this differently, and some of them do not let a page ask. Doing it by hand takes about the same time.
Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera on any system
Look at the right hand end of the address bar for a small install icon, a monitor with an arrow. Click it, then Install. If it is not there, open the browser menu and look for Install OBSCURA OS, or Cast, save and share, then Install page as app.
Safari on macOS Sonoma or newer
File, then Add to Dock. Safari never offers this itself, so the button above can only point here. Safari on older versions of macOS cannot do it, and the site works normally in a tab instead.
Firefox
Firefox on a computer does not offer to install a site as an app. Nothing is missing from the site itself, so use it in a tab, or install from another browser and keep using Firefox for everything else.
iPhone and iPad
The Share button, then Add to Home Screen. In Safari that is the square with an arrow; other browsers on iOS 16.4 or later have the same item in their share menu.
Android
The browser's menu offers Install app or Add to Home screen. Once installed, the share sheet can send a file straight to the workbench.
Opening your files with it
In Chrome and Edge on Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS, an installed app can be the program a file opens in. Each Workspace app installs on its own, from its own page, and takes its own kinds of file:
- Docs: Word documents (.docx), Markdown (.md), web pages and plain text.
- Sheets: Excel workbooks (.xlsx), CSV and tab-separated text.
- Slides: PowerPoint decks (.pptx).
- Notes: Markdown and plain text.
- PDF, Calendar (.ics), Contacts (.vcf) and Drive each take theirs too.
- The Pro applications install the same way: PDF Studio (.pdf), Case (.pst, .ost, .mbox, .eml, .msg, .zip and case files), the Engineering Suite (.step, .stl, .3mf, .obj, .iges), Foundry (.dxf), the Sovereign Suite (logs, SBOMs and certificates) and Umbra (source files: .js, .ts, .py, .html, .css, .json, .md and more). Without a Pro key, a file opened with one waits on its sign-in screen and opens once you have signed in.
Install the app from its page, then right-click a file in your file manager and choose Open with. The first time, the browser asks whether that app may open that kind of file; say yes and it is remembered. If the app is already open, the file opens in the window you have rather than a new one. OBSCURA OS itself, installed from this page, takes all of these and more, and opens each in the right application in a window on the desktop.
Safari, Firefox and the phones do not let an installed site open files this way. On a phone, the share sheet does the same job: share a file to OBSCURA OS and it arrives on the workbench.
From one application to the next
Every application here has Open in, which lists only the applications and tools that take the file in front of you: a Case document to PDF Studio to redact or sign, and back into the case as a new version; a Docs, Sheets or Slides file to PDF Studio as a PDF; a picture between the Photo Editor and PDF Studio; a note from Notes or a script kept in Drive to Umbra, and a file from Umbra to Docs, or its code to PDF Studio as a PDF. The file goes from one page to the next inside your browser, never through a server.
If the application is already open in another tab, the file goes into that tab and the page you are on stays as it is. The browser does not let one tab bring another to the front, so switch to it yourself. In Chrome and Edge you can also drag the file from the Open in window into another OBSCURA window, or onto your desktop to save it. A drag between two different browsers, or between a private window and an ordinary one, carries nothing across, because they do not share storage.
What this is not
This is an installed web app, not a signed native program. In practice the difference is small: it runs in its own window, it works offline, and it keeps its own icon. It cannot run before you have visited the site once, and it is only as current as the last time the device was online.
There is no signed application for Windows, macOS or Linux, and none is being built at the moment. If that changes, the letter will say so.
One thing worth doing after you install
Open it once while you still have a connection and click through the tools you actually use. Everything you open is kept, so the copy on your machine is complete before you need it somewhere with no signal.
If you have not set up the folder yet, do that too. Settings has the button, and after that every document, sheet, deck and note you make is written into a real folder on your disk, in ordinary formats, whether or not this site is ever reachable again.