Building an Offline-First Progressive Web App Without React or Next.js

Short summary

A production PWA built with vanilla JavaScript, Service Workers, and Firebase achieves reliable offline support without React or Next.js. Key architectural learnings: route resources through different caching strategies based on content type, safeguard session-dependent pages, and treat the service worker as your application's control plane. Perceived performance through micro-interactions and intentional design outweighs raw latency optimization.

• •Service worker functions as a routing layer; different resource types require different caching strategies (cache-first, network-first, pass-through, always-fresh)
• •Public pages can be pre-cached safely; session-dependent and sensitive content must always be fetched fresh to prevent privacy breaches
• •Perceived performance via micro-interactions and visual feedback matters more than measured speed; implement versioning and recovery mechanisms for failed deployments

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