• Gamey@feddit.rocks
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • 𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      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

      • Gamey@feddit.rocks
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        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.