This is terrific! Jeremy shows how you can implement a fairly straightforward service worker for performance gains, but then really kicks it up a notch with a recipe for turning a regular website into a speedy single page app without framework bloat.
This in an intriguing promise (there’s no code yet):
A PWA typically requires writing a service worker, an app manifest and a ton of custom code. Progressier flattens the learning curve. Just add it to your html template — you’re done.
I worry that this one line of code will pull in many, many, many, many lines of JavaScript.
This is a great way to use a service worker to circumvent censorship:
After the visitor opens the website once over a VPN, the service worker is downloaded and installed. The VPN can then be disabled, and the service worker will take over to request content from non-blocked servers, effectively acting as a proxy.
So, why would you want to use a service worker? Here are some cool things you can do with it.
Chris lists some of the ways a service worker can enhance user experience.
A Chrome-only API for adding offline content to an index that can be exposed in Android’s “downloads” list. It just shipped in the lastest version of Chrome.
I’m not a fan of browser-specific non-standards but you can treat this as an enhancement—implementing it doesn’t harm non-supporting browsers and you can use feature detection to test for it.
This is a great proposal that would make the Cache API even more powerful by adding metadata to cached items, like when it was cached, how big it is, and how many times it’s been retrieved.
Browser are user agents, not developer agents.
Debugging an error message.
Making use of the real-time nature of push notifications without the annoying notification part.
Samsung Internet browser doesn’t yet support asynchronous `waitUntil`, but that’s okay.
Pour one out for rel=”serviceworker”