The beginning of this story is almost as old as Chrome itself. It started ten years ago - precisely on version 5.0.375 - when Application Cache (AppCa

AppCache's forgotten tales

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2021-08-02 03:30:04

The beginning of this story is almost as old as Chrome itself. It started ten years ago - precisely on version 5.0.375 - when Application Cache (AppCache) was first implemented and shipped into Chrome.

Over time, as the web grew and evolved, AppCache lost its relevance with the rising popularity of new features such as Service Workers and ended relegated to the sidelines of web application development.

More than that - Chrome’s AppCache implementation proved to be a security and stability liability - becoming the 2nd most troublesome client-side storage API in the Web Platform [1], with over 400 Chromium CLs during the period of 2018 and 2019.

It was no surprise when Application Cache was both deprecated and set under removal in WHATWG’s standard [2] as well as marked obsolete in W3C’s HTML 5.1 [3].

The Chrome team followed suit by deprecating AppCache in Chrome 67 as part of a larger effort to remove powerful features on insecure origins [4] - it was soon removed from non-secure contexts [5] in Chrome 70.