This kind of capability will be very beneficial in making web apps behave more like a first-class native application. For example, I frequently "send" an SMS when I have no service knowing it will be processed later when the network is restored (without manual intervention).

(Slightly tangential) does anyone else predict and hope for a looser coupling between client and server?

Even in the age of increased connectivity, an app or static client experience, rather than streaming (except for obvious cases like video and music), in my mind would greatly improve the web for the user. Especially if not every user action can be tracked with an AJAX request.

I've only started looking into building apps offline-first (late to the party) but with tech like CouchDB, service workers etc - it's becoming much easier to build a more decentralized online experience (and interestingly return to an earlier epoch).

But is it going to be a general standard implemented in other browsers?

All I could find was this, from the article: "It’ll be a while before all browsers support background sync, especially as Safari and Edge don’t yet support service workers."

It talks about using code to check to see if it's supported in the user's browser under "Progressive Enhancement".

It's got a spec https://wicg.github.io/BackgroundSync/spec/, and Mozilla is interested https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!topic/bli...

This is exactly the kind of functionality that I was missing when I was building Toc [1], a decentralized messaging app built on web technologies and Cordova.

Since mobile devices tend to pause apps rather aggressively, getting the Cordova app to retry message sending in the background required messing with native plugins, and getting the browser app to do this was simply not possible at the time.

Glad to see this feature finally become a proper web standard!

[1] http://toc.im/

This should be great. I work on a Cordova app where data submissions by the user are queued in some custom iOS code and regularly attempted if there is connectivity. When I read about Service Workers it sounded like they would be able to do this as part of standard HTML, but I didn't see any examples of people using them that way.

With great power, comes great responsibility.

edit: nvm, didn't see execution time cap

> Open Emojoy.

FTFY:

> Open Emojoy. In Chrome.

This is covered in the paragraph before. "if you want to try this you’ll need either Chrome Dev for Android, or Chrome Canary for desktop."