The service worker life cycle is one of the most important concepts you must master in order to create proper service workers. This part of the service worker discipline is often overlooked and leads to many questions and frustrations expressed on sites such as Stack Overflow. But mastering the service worker life cycle allows you to seamlessly register and update service workers.

I think developers overlook the life cycle because it is not obvious until they hit an obstacle due to not understanding the service worker lifespan. The issue that confuses most developers is when a service worker becomes active.

Service workers obey a known life cycle that allows a new service worker to get itself ready without disrupting the current one. The life cycle is designed for the best user experience.

When a service worker is registered, it does not immediately...