Service workers are awesome

In the war between native and web apps there’s a few aspects that make a native app superior to a web app. Among these are features like push notifications and offline caching. A native app, once installed, is capable of providing the user with a cache of older content (possibly updated in the background) while it’s fetching new, fresh content. This is a great way to avoid loading times for content and it’s something that browser vendors tried to solve with cache manifests and AppCache. Everybody who has tried to implement offline caching for their webpages will know that the AppCache manifest files are a nightmare to maintain and that they’re pretty mysterious about how and when they store things. And so the gap between native and web remained unchanged.