About 5 months ago I documented my Service Worker caching strategy and it was noted that it wouldn't work in Firefox because of my use of waitUntil. It was also noted that, well, my Service Worker didn't actually work. It worked for me or so I thought, but every so often on a new page you could see it error and then quickly re-fetch from the network.

I made a number of changes to make the code more readable, however I didn't solve the actual issue and it turns out my understanding of cache.put was incorrect and instead of returning a promise with the 'putted' value, it returns a promise with void and as such my logic for returning that to the user.

So what does it look like? For each request I

1. Fetch from the network and push the result into the cache
2. Retrieve from the cache, or if the response is not in the cache then wait for the network request in 1 to complete and return the response.

self.onfetch = function(e) 

  const request = e.request;
  const url = new URL(e.request.url);

  // Always do a fetch, in parrallel.
  var fetchPromise = fetch(request.clone()).then(networkResponse => {
    const chain = Promise.resolve(networkResponse.clone());
    if(networkResponse.ok)
      return caches.open(dataStoreVersion)
              .then(cache => {
                cache.put(request, networkResponse);
                return chain;
              });
    return chain;
  }).catch(error => {
    console.log("Fetch Error", error);
    throw error;
  });

  e.waitUntil(fetchPromise);

  const r = caches.open(dataStoreVersion).then(cache => {
    return cache.match(request.clone()).then(response => {
      // Return the cache or the fetch if not there.
      return response || fetchPromise;
    });
  }).catch(error => {
    console.log("Error in SW", error);
    throw error;
  });

  e.respondWith(r);
}

Now it all works. It is on too much different from my previous effort.

I lead the Chrome Developer Relations team at Google.

We want people to have the best experience possible on the web without having to install a native app or produce content in a walled garden.

Our team tries to make it easier for developers to build on the web by supporting every Chrome release, creating great content to support developers on web.dev, contributing to MDN, helping to improve browser compatibility, and some of the best developer tools like Lighthouse, Workbox, Squoosh to name just a few.

I love to learn about what you are building, and how I can help with Chrome or Web development in general, so if you want to chat with me directly, please feel free to book a consultation.

I'm trialing a newsletter, you can subscribe below (thank you!)

Enter your email

Book a consultation