Google wants you to be able to use your PWA’s even if you’re offline

Something you may not have thought about before, when using a PWA in Chrome, is that you can’t use the PWA if it’s being launched while offline. If the PWA is already open, then you’ll just see a bunch of offline indicators. However, Google’s latest Chromium Gerrit commit (via Chrome Story) includes an experimental flag that could change things.

Before, if you tried to launch a PWA while your device was offline, the app simply wouldn’t load. With this new experimental flag, you’ll be able to not only load the PWA, but also interact with it. This could be extremely handy if you created a PWA for something like Todoist and need to add some tasks. Any changes made would then be synced when your device went online.

One of the key reasons why this could be handy is that you would be able to open those PWAs and they would basically work in offline mode. That can be really convenient, especially for those who tend to travel a lot and sometimes just need to work on something regardless of whether you’re connected to the internet.

This new flag is in the latest Chromium Gerrit, and we’ll be keeping an eye on the progress. Hopefully, it will eventually make its way down the pipeline and become a default feature for everyone.