Google wants websites to function more like apps, even when offline

Someday soon, users may be able to interact with their favorite websites even when these sites aren’t accessible, thanks to a new browser standard called Service Workers being developed by Google. With Service Workers, “We can make sure when you go to your site, it always feels responsive, that it is always there, even if it isn’t up-to-date,” explained Google software engineer Alex Russell at the O’Reilly Velocity conference, held this week in New York. A Service Worker “is basically an in-browser proxy that gives you the power to script what happens before you go to the network, and what happens after you get back from the network,” Russell explained to an audience of Web developers and administrators. Russell is a co-editor of a World Wide Web Consortium draft specifying how Service Workers should be implemented in browsers. Service Workers would provide a space on the user’s browser for offline processing, allowing a website to store documents, and offer resources. It could also speed delivery of Web content by reducing the amount of back-and-forth communication that goes on between a browser and a server. Web users are accustomed to seeing only a simple error statement if a browser can’t access a website. This however, is an anachronism, a primitive approach compared to how modern desktop applications work, Russell explained.