Service Worker Update Patterns Compared
When you deploy a new service worker, the browser installs it next to the old one and then has to decide when the new version takes over the pages that are already open. There are five established ways to handle that moment: wait for every tab to close, activate immediately with skipWaiting(), ask the user to reload, switch at the next in-app navigation, or activate and reload automatically. Each trades update speed against the risk of running old page code against a new worker. This post compares all five, puts them through the same deploy scenarios, and ends with a decision table and a hybrid policy that lets each release choose its own pattern. The step-by-step implementation of each pattern lives on Updating Service Workers.