Service Workers always available

[aarongustafson]

The Service Worker API is regularly unavailable in cases where a user refreshes a page, or privacy modes are enabled.

Service Workers have uses beyond caching:

• Adapting stream protocols (i.e. SHOUTcast/Icecast ICY) to work in standard HTMLMediaElements. (MediaSource Extensions do not work here.)
• Streaming data for image elements (and others) from alternative sources (Bluetooth, MIDI, WebSocket, wherever.)
• Auto-resuming/graceful handling of uploads.
• Streaming dynamically rendered "downloads".
• API abstraction (fetch('midi.local/ch1/patch'), and maybe the Service Worker goes and does the actual MIDI work)

We can't rely on any of these things today because Service Workers are often simply unavailable.

Rather than disabling the Service Worker in privacy mode, or on refresh, it makes more sense to disable its storage. That way, all of these other alternative use cases can still work.

[guest271314]

There are ways of keeping ServiceWorkers alive https://plnkr.co/edit/4AWjlY2wFbgiqbZQ. I would suggest using WebTransport.

[aarongustafson]

@jungkees @jakearchibald Thoughts on this?