Comparison between Progressive Web App and Regular Web App

Sammanfattning: In 2015 the term Progressive Web Application was coined to describe applications that are getting the advantage of all Progressive App features. Some of the essential features are offline support, app-like interface, secure connection, etc. Since then, case studies from PWA’s implementation showed optimistic promises for improving web page performance, time spent on site, user engagement, etc. The goal of this report is to analyze some of the effects of PWA. This work will investigate the browser compatibility of PWA’s features, compare and analyze performance and memory consumption effect of PWA’s features compared to Regular WebApp. Results showed a lot of the features of PWA are still not sup-ported by some major browsers. Performance benchmark showed that required https connection for PWA is slowing down all of the PWA’s performance metrics on the first visit. On a repeat visit, some of the PWA features like speed index is outperforming the Regular Web App. Memory consumption on PWA increased more than 2 times the size of RWA. The conclusion is that even if some features are not directly supported by browsers, they still might have workaround solutions. PWA is slower than regular web app if https on your web server is not optimized. Different browsers have different memory limitations for PWA caches. You should implement https and PWA features only if you have HTTP/2 support on your web server, otherwise, performance can decrease.