[nolanl]

(Author here.) I totally agree and feel that Service Workers are still underexplored in this area. If your main reason for writing an SPA is speeding up navigation (e.g. the Turbolinks approach), then you may be better served by just moving the rendering logic into a Service Worker.

It should be possible to build an "MPA" where all the rendering logic lives in the Service Worker. Then you'd get fast navigations without needing to worry about a client-side router and managing focus/scroll/etc. I'm not sure I've seen a great implementation of this though.

[keybits]

Here’s a great example of how this can be done https://instantmultipageapp.com/

[nolanl]

Thank you! This is exactly what I had in mind. The streaming aspect of MPA pages is a great example of something you can't really do in an SPA. (Although there are hacks: https://jakearchibald.com/2016/fun-hacks-faster-content/)