One GIF, many PNGs
A GIF is a container for a sequence, so converting one to PNG is not a one-to-one operation. Each frame becomes its own file, and what you get back is a numbered set rather than a single image. That is why the result arrives as a zip even when you only dropped in one file.
If the GIF is a still, the sequence has a length of one and you get a single PNG. Nothing about the page changes; the file you gave it decides how many come back.
Nothing is lost in this direction
Both formats are lossless, and PNG is the more capable of the two in every respect that matters here. GIF holds at most 256 colours per frame and one bit of transparency; PNG holds sixteen million colours and 256 levels of transparency. So every frame is carried across exactly, with the transparent colour becoming genuine alpha.
That makes this the safe direction. Converting the other way, PNG to GIF, is where the compromises live, and there is a separate page here that explains them rather than pretending they do not exist.
What people actually do with the frames
Three uses cover most of the reasons people extract gif frames. The first is picking a still: a reaction GIF has one good frame in it and you want that frame as a clean image. The second is repairing an animation, where one frame has a typo or an artefact and you intend to fix it and rebuild the GIF afterwards, which the GIF maker on this site will do from the corrected sequence. The third is feeding a sprite sheet or an animation tool that expects numbered stills as its input.
Everything runs in your browser. Frames are extracted locally, nothing is sent to a server, and the engine is fetched once on first use and cached afterwards.