Google is working on a new feature that will allow you to launch a Progressive Web App (PWA) when you are offline.

Launch PWAs When Offline (First Launch)

What’s the biggest attraction of a PWA? You can use it even when your computer is offline. I did not know that you cannot launch a PWA for the first time when you are offline.

Yes, if you have a PWA open and your internet connection is disconnected, you can continue using your PWA. However, if you launch a PWA app for the first time when offline, you’ll see something like this:

Google is changing this.

A new experimental flag in the Chromium Gerrit wants to help you launch web apps even when you are offline.

Desktop PWAs Web Bundles: Adds support for web bundles, making web apps able to be launched offline.

The feature request bug also makes this abundantly clear: “Web Apps should be able to support first launches while offline.”

Summary

I am not 100% convinced that PWAs could not be launched without a working internet connection. On the contrary, I always thought that we could launch and use PWAs without an internet connection.

So what will be the advantages of this change? First, you can continue to work on documents even if you launch a web app without an internet connection. Second, this might also open the way for web apps that will install and work as an always-offline mode, think games.

Anything else that you can think of? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Source: Chromium Gerrit and bugs.chromium.org.