After spending a month in Mexico, including regions with spotty/inconsistent service from one minute to the next, I think the problem goes deeper.

Browsers are IMO terrible at mitigating intermittent and very slow connections. Nothing I browse seems to be effectively cached other than Hacker News. Browsers just give up when a connection disappears, rather than holding what they have and trying again in a little bit.

The only thing I used which kept working was DropBox. DropBox never gives up, it just keeps trying to sync and eventually it will succeed if there is any possibility of doing so.

I understand the assumptions of the web are different than an app like Dropbox, but I think it might be a good idea to reexamine those assumptions.