Imagine an e-commerce site that lets you review your order history and product pages offline (even if a bit outdated). That kind of experience feels genuinely useful—much more so than the "you're offline, here’s a cute dog (I love the pictures though)" fallback most sites provide.
Over the weekend, I experimented with service workers for the first time (assisted by Vibe coding). My initial impression was honestly a bit magical—“this website works offline, unlike most mobile apps these days that are just WebView-wrapped SPAs and crash offline.” [1]
That said, debugging was rough. Vibe coding output had subtle issues I found hard to untangle as a newcomer, cache saved v/s cache matching was being done incorrectly in the code, which LLM wasn't able to point out (cors/non-cors requests had issue).And Chrome’s DevTools made debugging manageable, but Firefox’s service worker support felt clunky in comparison (personal take).
Curious if others feel the same—are PWAs underused because of DX hurdles, lack of awareness, or just industry momentum around SPAs?