this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
67 points (95.9% liked)

Firefox

17302 readers
71 users here now

A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As far as I know their main purpose is to cache various parts of the website properly which is a lot more than just a shortcut.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Regular websites can do that too using service workers - Lemmy's webapp uses this to show an error when an instance is unreachable

What we call a PWA is usually just a webpage with a webmanifest, and a service worker script to manage loading those cached resources you mentioned

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Seems like you are right, the caching for proper offline usage and use with very limited internet connections is all done trough service workers. Their main job seems to be system integration and while Firefox Android kind of sucks at that too it doesn't seem like they ever cut that down so they just dropped it for desktop users.