Hello everyone,
I’m happy to announce that we’re ready to deprecate the service worker!
On Thursday Dec 7th, 2023 we will gradually start rolling out a new version of the boundary nodes that leverages icx-proxy to verify HTTP responses on the boundary node itself.
We’re excited for this change for all the reasons mentioned in the original post. Based on community responses, we believe it will make the user and developer experience that much more enjoyable.
Who is affected:
All the dapps being served from the DFINITY gateways (*.ic0.app, *.icp0.io and hosted custom domains) will be affected.
Note that dapps being served from a custom gateway implementation will remain unchanged.
What to expect:
The most noticeable change will be that the service worker loading screen will not pop up anymore. Inspecting requests in your browser console will show regular HTTP calls for fetching HTTP assets instead of the encoded ones.
It’s important to note that streamed responses larger than 8Mb will not be verified by icx-proxy and instead served as is. According to our metrics, requests with larger responses were very infrequent and represented an almost insignificant percentage of the total HTTP traffic. We will address verification for larger streamed responses at a later stage.
As a reminder, for those of you looking for an implementation of the HTTP Gateway Protocol that runs locally, you’re welcome to try out the IC http-proxy. In the future we will be investing more resources into the IC http-proxy to make it more efficient and extend support to mobile devices.
As usual, your feedback and comments are welcome.