Firefox 44 arrived this week, and with it came service workers and push notifications, the latter dependent on the former. We’re big fans of the Service Worker API and the possibilities it brings to the web. Service workers power some of the best new HTML5 features, such as offline experiences and the just-mentioned push notifications.
So, now that service workers are supported by Chrome, Opera, and Firefox, the spotlight is on the remaining two of the big five: Edge, and Safari. The noises coming from Microsoft have been positive with respect to implementation, and officially it’s now under consideration.
And then there’s Safari, which is, if the diagram below is anything to go by, fast becoming the basket case of browsers. Like Edge, officially, service worker is under consideration, and as pointed out by Jake Archibald, there have been somewhat positive noises coming from Apple:
People think they want it, some of them actually do want it. We should probably do it.
Hopefully this will come sooner rather than later. If it doesn’t OSX and iOS users will suffer subpar web experiences compared with those on other platforms and browsers. There will be no progressive apps for Safari users. This is a sad story, because there once was a day when Safari, through its WebKit development, was a pioneer of web technology. Today, people refer to it as the new IE. It has a lot of catching up to do.
HTML5 support in major browsers (source: caniuse.com)
Links:
Chrome status page
Firefox status page
MS Edge status page
WebKit status page
Mozilla service worker documentation
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