ServiceWorker static routing API

Category: Service Worker
Type: New or changed feature
Status: Enabled by default (Chrome 123)
Intent stage: None

Summary

This API allows developers to configure the routing, and allows them to offload simple things ServiceWorkers do. If the condition matches, the navigation happens without starting ServiceWorkers or executing JavaScript, which allows web pages to avoid performance penalties due to ServiceWorker interceptions.

Motivation

Starting ServiceWorkers is known to be a slow process, and web users need to wait for its startup if the ServiceWorker intercepts loading the page resources. At the same time, the ServiceWorker brings flexibility to the transport layer, and it behaves as a client-side proxy. Developers can implement offline support or provide client-side content modification with it. Currently, ServiceWorkers intercept all requests for pages within their scope, which brings a performance penalty within the scope.

Standards & signals

Specification: https://github.com/w3c/ServiceWorker/pull/1701
Firefox: Positive
Safari: No signal — Informal positive signals at TPAC, but no official standards position.
Web developers: Positive — We see many positive signals and feedback from developers on the Github issue and other places (e.g. https://jakearchibald.com/2019/service-worker-declarative-router/#disqus_thread). Also, we have partners who participated in the OT.
Tracking bug: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1371756

Explainers: https://github.com/WICG/service-worker-static-routing-api

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