Editing offline
How canvas documents survive a flaky or offline connection — local snapshots, queued edits, and the revert-conflict prompt.
Editing offline
Canvas documents stay editable when your connection is slow, flaky, or completely offline. Edits you type while disconnected are stored locally on your device and pushed to the server when the connection comes back.
What works offline
- Reopening a document. Once you've opened a document while online, your browser keeps a local copy. Closing and reopening the tab while offline shows the last state you saw — no spinner, no waiting.
- Editing. You can type, format, insert blocks, and run all the usual editor commands. Edits queue locally.
- Reconnecting. When the network returns, queued edits flush to the server automatically. You don't need to refresh the page.
- Multi-tab sanity. If two tabs have the same document open, both can edit. The Loro CRDT merges everyone's edits commutatively.
What you'll see in the editor
A small status pill appears in the top-right of the document chrome when the editor isn't fully live:
| Pill | Meaning |
|---|---|
| (no pill) | Live — your edits are syncing in real time. |
| Reconnecting… | Currently re-establishing the WebSocket. Edits keep typing into the local copy. |
| Offline — changes will sync | Disconnected, but your local copy is intact. Edits queue. |
| Offline storage unavailable | Your browser doesn't support local storage for offline editing (older Safari, private browsing). The editor still works while you're online; closing the tab while offline will lose unsent edits. |
| Connection error | Something went wrong with the WebSocket. The editor retries automatically. |
The editor stays editable in every state above except the cold-start case where you've never opened the document before and the connection fails on the first try. That case still shows the existing "This document is taking longer than expected to load" toast.
What happens if someone reverts the document while you're offline
If a teammate reverts the document to an earlier version while you have offline edits queued, you'll be asked what to do when you reconnect:
- Keep my edits. Your offline edits are re-applied on top of the reverted version. The server treats them as new edits made after the revert.
- Discard my edits. Your offline edits are dropped. The document loads at the reverted version with no local changes.
You'll only see this prompt if you have unsent edits and a revert happened during your offline window. If your edits are already synced to the server before someone reverts, the revert behaves the same way it always has — you see a toast and the document jumps to the reverted version.
Browser support
Offline editing relies on the Origin Private File System, available in:
- Chrome / Edge / Brave 86+
- Firefox 111+
- Safari 16.4+ (macOS Ventura 13.3+, iOS 16.4+)
Older browsers fall back to in-memory storage: you can still edit while online, but unsent edits won't survive a page reload or tab close.
Privacy
Local document state is stored per origin (the tenant subdomain). Closing the browser doesn't clear it; uninstalling the browser, clearing site data, or using "Clear browsing data" → "Site data" does. The local storage is scoped per tenant — opening a document on one tenant subdomain never makes it readable from another.