Chrome 40 beta: Offline service workers

http://blog.chromium.org/2014/12/chrome-40-beta-powerful-offline-and.html

by aarkay • 12 years ago

78 12 12 years ago

blog.chromium.org

msoad• 12 years ago

Service Workers are what Application Cache should have been first. Application Cache has a big flaw and that is, you can't control it much. You depend on browser to decide what to do when there is no Internet connection. With Service Workers you get to programmatically tell browser what to do with network requests and so on.

Classic configuration file vs. let me write actual code approach. I'm glad we have both now! Application Cache makes sense for a lot of static websites.

Someone1234• 12 years ago

I tried playing with Application Cache, but my applications kept getting "stuck." The user would return online and the old version of the application would be shown and it wouldn't update the one cached either...

Only solutions I found required configuring the web-server. Which is fine in theory, but when you consider that an application is a self-contained blob of static data in this context (i.e. HTML, CSS, JS, and a manifest) you'll potentially need one web-server cache policy for legitimately static content (i.e. HTML with no manifest) and another for Application Cache (i.e. HTML with a manifest) just to make sure the Application Cache is flushed correctly.

I find it very telling Google web-pages don't use Application Cache (e.g. Gmail). In fact the only thing in chrome://appcache-internals/ is the new-tab page.

danudey• 12 years ago

Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I recall that there is a way to tell the browser to 'flush' the application cache, but only once the user has loaded the old version of the application anyway; in other words, you can tell the browser that the next time they load the page, they should load the new version. Which seems odd.

ricktdotorg• 12 years ago

just for the record, Google Books (books.google.com) does indeed use Application Cache

ropiku3• 12 years ago

I'm glad it's a native feature.

I attended a talk by an FT engineer and I was amazed by what's possible.

Update: Mistakenly thought that FT uses Polyfill for service workers.

chrisrhoden• 12 years ago

I'm not sure I understand how these are related.

While what the Financial Times has done with polyfills is pretty neat, it at least does not document any of the behavior mentioned in this article.

In fact, it seems very clear that they are making use of App Cache for their website, which the technology mentioned in this article effectively replaces.

ropiku3• 12 years ago

Update: Sorry, I misunderstood.

Polyfills emulate service workers as they were not actually implemented in any browser. So they have to fall back on App Cache. But now they can seamlessly use Chrome's native service workers while still relying on polyfills for other browsers.

untog• 12 years ago

They're related in the sense that service workers will replace some of the functionality that the app cache provides. The FT's work has to use hacks like iframes with app caches to gain greater control over caching - so it's not a polyfill of service workers, just a halfway ground between what app cache provides, and a small section of the functionality service workers will provide.

lxgr• 12 years ago

[...] could do their work even after the page is closed, provided the user has given permission.

I'm really glad for the second half of that statement.

While I could imagine a few use cases, the last thing I want on my smartphone are arbitrary bloated sites draining my battery after closing them. I even consider it a feature of websites vs. native apps.

Chrome 40 beta: Offline service workers

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