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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

I tried service workers and even just unlaunching the feature was a major challenge. Our users ended up having cached versions of the site with a service worker for every and we had to put a ton of cache busters in to deal with it.

Not ready for primetime.

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Don't service workers expire within 24 hours if the service worker file is no longer accessible?

That's the documented behavior but we had user complaints long after that.

Your users could have long running sessions - Service workers are only redownloaded on new page loads.

Sorry but it is completely your own fault. We've been using Service Workers on production for two years now, and never had any issues of any sorts. Also kudos for "trying" a new API on production.

Person 1: "It didn't work for my single use case / environment / circumstances = non-working garbage"

Person 2: "It worked for my single use case / environment / circumstances = the best thing ever, it's your fault"

I'm a software engineer who works for Google who has worked on web tech for 25 years (hello NCSA and CERN). We went into this because a web dev on the team thought it would be a good solution, and put a bunch of work into it. After some time, we noticed that it added a ton of complexity and violated many of our core assumptions about how web pages work.

Note that service workers weren't really new when we used them, we deployed them carefully and with intent, with skilled developers.

Don't get me wrong- I like the idea behind service workers- I just found how they were implemented to be difficult.

Please consider the guidelines:

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

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