All six tools can be installed as an application on a Mac or on Windows: its own window, off the dock or the taskbar, with no browser around it. It keeps a copy of itself on the machine, so it opens and works with no internet connection at all.
There is nothing to download and nothing to run. The browser builds the application out of the site itself, which is why there is no installer to trust, no permissions to grant, and nothing that can quietly update itself into something else.
Checking whether your browser can install it…
Most browsers keep this in their own menus rather than letting a page ask, so the button above often will not appear even when installing works perfectly well. Yours is marked.
At the right-hand end of the address bar, past the star, look for a small icon of a screen with an arrow pointing into it. Click it and choose Install. It then appears in the Start menu and can be pinned to the taskbar.
No icon? Open Chrome's own menu — the ⋮ button at the very top right of the window, to the right of the address bar — and look for the entry with Install in it. Chrome has moved it between versions, so go by the word rather than by the position.
Same small icon at the right-hand end of the address bar — a screen with an arrow pointing into it. Click it and choose Install. It lands in your Applications folder and can be kept in the dock.
No icon? Open Chrome's own menu — the ⋮ button at the very top right of the Chrome window, not in the Mac menu bar along the top of the screen — and look for the entry with Install in it. Chrome has moved which submenu it sits in more than once, so go by the word.
If you would rather not hunt: Safari installs this in two clicks with File → Add to Dock, and the installed copy is the same thing.
Safari has no install button. Use File → Add to Dock, or the Share menu and then Add to Dock. This needs Safari 17 or newer, on macOS Sonoma or newer.
In Safari, tap the Share button and then Add to Home Screen. The camera-based QR reader and the document scanner are worth having on a phone in particular.
Tap the three-dot menu and choose Install app or Add to Home screen.
Firefox does not install web applications on the desktop. The site works perfectly well in it as an ordinary page; for an application window, use Chrome, Edge or Safari.
Compressing, converting, resizing, cropping, marking up, joining, QR codes and the privacy check all run on your own machine and need nothing from the network. Open the app on a train and it behaves exactly the same.
Hiding faces needs a 1.2 MB detector, removing backgrounds needs a larger one, and reading text off a scan needs about 20 MB of recogniser. Each is fetched the first time you ask for it and kept afterwards. Use them once while connected and they work offline too.
Whenever it opens with a connection it checks for a newer version and takes it. There is nothing to reinstall.
Uninstall it the way you would any application. To clear the copy the browser keeps without uninstalling, use the button below.