While I may not be an expert on the intricacies of Angular SW operations, the issue at hand revolves around the challenge of enforcing updates on Service Worker-driven applications:
- When a user opens a page on tab 1, the SW installs and pre-caches components (chunks) without loading all components immediately. Instead, it waits for user interaction to trigger component loading.
- Subsequently, when a user opens a page on tab 2, it loads instantly as the SW was already installed, and pre-cached files were present in the cache.
- However, if a developer updates the application and renames some chunks, things get complicated.
- The update is deployed to the server along with removal of old file versions, leaving only the new versions with different chunk names.
- As a result, when a user returns to tab 2, a force update occurs. The new SW removes old cached components and pre-caches the updated ones.
- Then comes the issue: if the app tries to lazy-load an old version of a chunk on tab 1 post-update, the process fails because the previous chunk no longer exists in either the browser cache or on the server.
In essence, failing to force-update all active instances of the app across different tabs within the same browser could lead to situations where the running JavaScript code attempts to lazy-load non-existent chunks, causing potential errors.