4 ms·

There are times when I either don't have access to the Internet, or my service is very slow. During those times, the apps on my phone are still useful, albeit,

by jes 11y ago

There are times when I either don't have access to the Internet, or my service is very slow. During those times, the apps on my phone are still useful, albeit, degraded in some respects. I'd still rather have that than nothing.

maxerickson 11y ago
A web app could be cached locally, so using the browser as a runtime wouldn't preclude working without a connection.
- jakub_g 11y ago
  (note I'm generally a pro-web anti-app guy) That is easier said than done. Never worked with the thing, but I've read everywhere that HTML appcache is not exactly the best thing ever invented and a pain to work with. Service workers which are proposed to supersede it are now being pushed by Chrome and others, but it sounded a bit complex (though powerful) when I read about it. Then come all the other issues about cache invalidation including involuntary automatic cache clean (hey, I'm low on memory, let's clear the cache!). Your apps generally don't automatically uninstall themselves (though they may clean their cached data, at least on iOS). Regarding the standard browser caching and "offline mode", it used to work well long time ago for simple static HTML pages (in Firefox and IE), but from my experience it doesn't work well for rich clientside apps (and Chrome doesn't even have "work offline" button)
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    The article is speculative. So I meant in principle, I have zero clue how practical it is right now.
  - jaffathecake 11y ago
    There's a spec in development to make an origin's storage persistent https://storage.spec.whatwg.org/#dom-storagemanager-requestpersistent https://storage.spec.whatwg.org/#dom-storagemanager-requestp... - at the moment Chrome only drops data from indexeddb and the cache api if the device starts running out of space.
dyoder 11y ago
Many, if not most, apps that depend on the Internet in some fashion do not handle losing the connection gracefully. Furthermore, it has been possible to write Web apps that can run disconnected (assuming they've been run at least once with a working connection, analogous to downloading an app).
brlewis 11y ago
Web apps are improving in this respect. I'm particularly interested in stale-while-revalidate that has experimental Chromium support now: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=348877 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=348877 CDNs (at least Fastly) already support it, but browser support will give web app updates the option of working like native app updates.

by jes 11y ago

maxerickson 11y ago

A web app could be cached locally, so using the browser as a runtime wouldn't preclude working without a connection.

jakub_g 11y ago
(note I'm generally a pro-web anti-app guy) That is easier said than done. Never worked with the thing, but I've read everywhere that HTML appcache is not exactly the best thing ever invented and a pain to work with. Service workers which are proposed to supersede it are now being pushed by Chrome and others, but it sounded a bit complex (though powerful) when I read about it. Then come all the other issues about cache invalidation including involuntary automatic cache clean (hey, I'm low on memory, let's clear the cache!). Your apps generally don't automatically uninstall themselves (though they may clean their cached data, at least on iOS). Regarding the standard browser caching and "offline mode", it used to work well long time ago for simple static HTML pages (in Firefox and IE), but from my experience it doesn't work well for rich clientside apps (and Chrome doesn't even have "work offline" button)
- maxerickson 11y ago
  The article is speculative. So I meant in principle, I have zero clue how practical it is right now.
- jaffathecake 11y ago
  There's a spec in development to make an origin's storage persistent https://storage.spec.whatwg.org/#dom-storagemanager-requestpersistent https://storage.spec.whatwg.org/#dom-storagemanager-requestp... - at the moment Chrome only drops data from indexeddb and the cache api if the device starts running out of space.

dyoder 11y ago

Many, if not most, apps that depend on the Internet in some fashion do not handle losing the connection gracefully. Furthermore, it has been possible to write Web apps that can run disconnected (assuming they've been run at least once with a working connection, analogous to downloading an app).

brlewis 11y ago

Web apps are improving in this respect. I'm particularly interested in stale-while-revalidate that has experimental Chromium support now: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=348877 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=348877 CDNs (at least Fastly) already support it, but browser support will give web app updates the option of working like native app updates.