Well, it's "new" in the same way that HTML5 is new. It's been around for a few years.
The last time period that I played around with it was when iOS 3 was out, and it was horribly buggy (if you failed to download all of the things listed in the cache in the first go, then it would break and would refuse to ever try again). By iOS 4 it was less broken, but still weird.
Since it's been out there for a while it would probably be difficult to remove. Because of its brokenness I doubt that it ever got much usage, but there is probably some people out there that rely on it.
What I hope is that after ServiceWorker is better supported, someone can build out the old AppCache behaviour in JavaScript using the ServiceWorker APIs, and then we can use that for compatibility and remove AppCache from the browser itself.
Comments
Well, it's "new" in the same way that HTML5 is new. It's been around for a few years.
The last time period that I played around with it was when iOS 3 was out, and it was horribly buggy (if you failed to download all of the things listed in the cache in the first go, then it would break and would refuse to ever try again). By iOS 4 it was less broken, but still weird.
Since it's been out there for a while it would probably be difficult to remove. Because of its brokenness I doubt that it ever got much usage, but there is probably some people out there that rely on it.
What I hope is that after ServiceWorker is better supported, someone can build out the old AppCache behaviour in JavaScript using the ServiceWorker APIs, and then we can use that for compatibility and remove AppCache from the browser itself.