Progressive Web Apps with React

The service worker life cycle

The life of your service worker begins when a user first visits your page. The service worker is downloaded and begins running. It may go idle for a time when not needed, but can then restart when required.

This always on functionality is what makes the service workers useful for push notifications. It also makes service workers a bit unintuitive to work with (more on that to come). However, let's take a deep look at the life and death of a service worker on a typical page.

First, the service worker is installed, if possible. All service worker installations will start with a check to see whether the technology is supported by the user's browser. As of now, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera have full support, and other ...