A month ago, I published  Your PWA is going to break in August 2021 to help developers deal with the then-upcoming changes in Chrome 93 that popped up in everyone’s browser console “Page does not work offline. Starting in Chrome 93, the installability criteria is changing, and this site will not be installable.”

Google is backing off

Great news! A few days ago, Google decided to pause their plans. And it looks like those plans are going to be on hold for a while — if not indefinitely.

Google decided to put their plans to break your PWA on hold. You can see the announcement here.

In my original article, I postulated that Google wanted to change the installability rules because many developers use a hack that allows them to benefit from the installation feature without having to do anything to make the app actually accessible offline.

self.addEventListener('fetch', function (event) {
  //DO NOTHING BECAUSE YOLO 🐵
});

This is what the fetch event listener looks like for a lot of installable high-traffic websites. That’s enough to satisfy the criteria of “being available offline” currently.

Offline != Installable

I’m genuinely wondering why Google absolutely insists on coupling the two concepts together. Their dogma is that a PWA should work offline. And therefore for an PWA to be installable, it should demonstrate that it can work offline.

The problem is that some apps really can’t do anything useful while offline. And that’s actually okay, no? Look at the offline fallback of the LinkedIn app below. Does it actually let you do anything useful at all?

I can’t do much useful with LinkedIn app when offline. And that’s a native app.

#javascript #web #web-development #pwa