Chapter 1. Understanding Progressive Web Apps
Imagine that you had the ability to build a website that worked completely offline, offered your users near instant load times, and yet was secure and resilient to unreliable networks at the same time. Sounds both impossible and amazing! Believe it or not, most modern browsers already have these features built into them—they only need to be unlocked. When you build a website that takes advantage of these powerful features, you have what is known as a Progressive Web App (PWA).
In this chapter, you’ll learn what makes a web app progressive and how you can unlock the powerful functionality that already lies within your browser. By the end of the chapter, you’ll have a clear understanding of the benefits that PWAs bring to users and why they are such a game-changer for the web. Finally, we’ll look at a real-life example of a company that’s already benefitting from using a PWA.
Way back during Christmas 1990, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and his team at CERN built all the tools necessary for a working web. They created HTTP, HTML, and the world’s first web browser, called WorldWideWeb.[1] The web pages that the first browser could run were simple plain-text pages with hyperlinks. In fact, those first web pages are still online and available to view today.