Avoid caching module failures

Category: Network / Connectivity
Type: New or changed feature
Status: Proposed (Chrome Proposed)
Intent stage: None

Summary

Currently web developers cannot retry failed module loads, as these failures are being cached (and retries just result in immediate failures). This change to the module loading behavior enables failed module loads to be manually retried (e.g. by calling `import()` again), solving real developer (and user) pain when it comes to using modules over unstable networks.

Motivation

This change enables developers to retry failed module loads (e.g. due to network failures).

Standards & signals

Specification: https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/10327
Firefox: Shipped/Shipping
Safari: Shipped/Shipping
Web developers: Strongly positive — The issue was originally opened by developers and the spec change was driven by them. Multiple different teams at Shopify are hitting the issues that this is solving. I'm pretty confident that this is a common issue.
Tracking bug: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/534781954

Explainers: https://gist.github.com/yoavweiss/a54501545ab2ad22bfde0ebed02a115c

View on chromestatus.com