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Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

The proper solution to this problem is for content providers to build a properly responsive site. Allowing apps to access browser cookies isn't going to fix anything - the reason that a native app doesn't open to the place you left off on the web is not because it's technically impossible, it's because app developers don't give a damn. Giving them more tools isn't going to change this.

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Allowing apps to access browser cookies is a solution to the problem that apps and websites are disconnected and don't know about each other's state. That's a different aspect than the one you're talking about.

Yes, you can build responsive sites, but what you can do in the browser is limited, especially when it comes to flaky connections that are still very typical. To take the example in the post a little bit further: Imagine you're on the train and are reading a multi-page New York Times article. Train goes into a tunnel. Trying to load the next page will result in a connection error. Native apps can know about your network state and can pre-cache content you're about to read next.

web apps can know about your network state and can pre-cache content you're about to read next. (http://www.html5rocks.com/en/mobile/workingoffthegrid/)

Last I checked, implementations of offline caching were unusably buggy. Has this improved?

Its rarely straighforward, but definitely usable

It works. LocalStorage API is pretty solid and widely supported, if you're doing some simple buffering to handle connectivity issues it's awesome, except that it prompts the user for permission to store data. WebSQL is solid where it's implemented, and IndexedDB is solid where it's implemented but unfortunately there isn't a lot of overlap (screw you apple). and AppCache works great, but figuring out how it works in the first place is annoying as hell.

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