14 DAY TRIAL // Google wants the world’s websites to work more like apps and to stop depending on active Internet connections to work. The 404 error pages are the ones frustrating Google to no end.
“Service Workers” is a new technology the company developed to give a helping hand for this exact thing. Alex Russell, Google software engineer, discussed about the new project during a conference that took place in New York earlier this week.
To make things short, Service Workers is a new browser standard that allows sites to store documents locally. This means that your favorite sites would work pretty much like an app would. This would help them render cached pages or other interactive content anywhere you go, even when the Internet connection is down.
Basically, if you, for instance, go through an area where you have no connectivity, you won’t get the 404 page, but rather an older version of the site. Russell says that they’d rather load something instead of nothing.
Faster loading times for all websites
This new technology wouldn’t just help out people when they don’t have an Internet connection, but also when the signal is low and the pages load slowly or when people want to visit pages that simply take more time than your usual website.
That’s because the new standard stores data locally so the loading process for websites is a lot shorter. A demonstration showed that the interface or cached saved page loads first on the device, while also updating if a connection is available. This will make big images load faster, for instance.
“The Service Worker is designed first to redress this balance by providing a Web Worker context, which can be started by a runtime when navigations are about to occur. This event-driven worker is registered against an origin and a path (or pattern), meaning it can be consulted when navigations occur to that location. Events that correspond to network requests are dispatched to the worker and the responses generated by the worker may over-ride default network stack behavior. This puts the Service Worker, conceptually, between the network and a document renderer, allowing the Service Worker to provide content for documents, even while offline,” reads an explanation provided by Russell in a paper published on the World Wide Web Consortium website.
The project needs some more work before it can be implemented in all browsers, but the first steps were taken already, which is encouraging.