Dear DEV Community Members,
I wanted to bring you all up to speed on a decision the Forem team recently made to remove our Service Worker functio...
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Any chance
/offlinecan direct to an online version of the page for doodling purposes? 😅We could potentially do that. I'd suggest creating a post on forem.dev to start that discusssion.
Posted 😊
forem.dev/terabytetiger/request-to...
dev.to/offline.html still works :)
you're one step ahead :D
You removed a feature that had limited value when it worked, often didn't work, and had serious maintenance costs...and you didn't have to wait 2-5 years to do so.
I, along with every other enterprise dev, are just going to live vicariously through you on this one.
I'm really glad to have your feedback on this subject. I also had a nightmare period with service workers (up to the point one mistake lead to one of my pet app to not be runnable anymore other than going in private browsing mode or to completely empty my cache, something that I knew my potential future users would not always be able to do for reasons).
And so I came to the conclusion Service Worker is like Peter Parker's powers. It puts so much pressure , and not enough benefits to justify this pressure imho. This is why I decided that I would never again use Service Worker other than providing offline backup (meaning I would only use the NetworkFirst strategy), which is the same thing you are deciding over there and I find this interesting.
I'm pretty convinced this technology has a long way to go until finally becoming mature enough to be reliably be considered as mainstream as an ordinary JS framework: easily removable, without any constraints or backfire.
I'm curious to know what other peers owning a Service Worker for their app (other than choosing this technology to deliver a product that could not be delivered without it) think about maintaining this piece 🧐
Interesting too that one browser (Safari) has caused the issues.
I totally get it. My C'YaPass PWA (progressive web app) Password Generator, worked on every browser platform except Safari. I had to add a button to allow the user to copy the password to her clipboard each time, even though every other browser will copy the password to the clipboard on. I also struggled to get it to work offline, but finally got it. All these browser vectors still create a lot of work for devs. 🤷
Safair is modern IE of old times.
That was an interesting read, thanks for sharing! I've had a few issues over the course of months on DEV with weird caching behaviour like seemingly resetting the theme, thinking I'm logged out or just having no styling whatsoever - all "fixed" by hard refreshing. Never raised an issue on it because I couldn't work out how to recreate it and each time it happened, I thought it was likely the last time (it was weeks between issues). Honestly sounds like my issues might have been with the service workers themselves given what you've said here.
Good work everyone involved with both identifying the issues, fixing the ones you could along the way and knowing when to try something else! 🙂
Had this issue too.
Wow, you're right about making tradeoffs. I liked the offline feature a lot that I was considering adding it to my job board, but now that I look back at the idea with this perspective, I think I'd very much not spend anymore engineering time on it. Especially if it's going to cause more trouble than it is worth potentially. Thanks for the writeup!
I think you should add a screenshot of the offline page as a souvenir :) it was great reading the way you and your team assessed the situation, rock on!
too bad .. now I have to find a better internet provider.
RIP offline page 😢 lol