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by egeozcan 2880 days ago
You can generally "Save As..." and they tend to work just fine. Like any code which has network access, they can be dependent on various resources. I sometimes run a downloaded file through an insecure chrome instance (--disable-web-security and a unique --user-data-dir) with a catch-all service-worker. That'd probably not work with applets as they make their requests outside the browser AFAIK.

Also the security sandbox of Javascript is one of the best, if not the best. So it cannot do anything it wants.
1 comments
genericid 2880 days ago
> Like any code which has network access, they can be dependent on various resources.

Online resources. So you cannot run them offline.

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gear54rus 2880 days ago
Well sorry you can't use some chat app without internet connection, our bad.
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genericid 2880 days ago
Not everything is a chat application. But even a chat application can and should partially work without an internet connection: Reading old messages and composing new ones can work offline.
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egeozcan 2880 days ago
That has nothing to do with Javascript. If you use canonical, cacheable URIs for your requests, my method above works fine.

In my day job, I'm working on a CRM and sales system that is 100% web based and does work offline and is even offline-first (I love you Germany, but your mobile network sucks).

There may be many other problems with it but offline is mostly a solved problem in the web world.

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genericid 2880 days ago
Quick experiment: In a new Firefox profile, I opened a couple of websites [1]. Then I went offline and tried to load them again. Every time I just got the default "server not found" page of Firefox.

"Offline" is no more solved "not hijacking scrolling", "linkable URLs" and "not re-inventing <a href> badly".

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/, https://www.google.com/, https://en.wikipedia.org, https://www.reddit.com/, https://www.nytimes.com

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egeozcan 2880 days ago
Did you try right clicking and choosing "Save as..."?

As I said before, it's a 5-minute thing to get started with service-workers. Web-sites can use that and then you don't even need to save. There is this great offline library, fellow developers! Use it! What other platform gives you such easy-to-use offline capabilities?

> "not hijacking scrolling", "linkable URLs" and "not re-inventing <a href> badly"

You are dealing with a Turing-complete language here. Navigation situation is still way better than the applets.

What is the alternative you are supporting instead the current situation?

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