One overriding problem that web users have suffered with for years is loss of connectivity. The best web app in the world will provide a terrible user experience if you can’t download it. There have been various attempts to create technologies to solve this problem, as our Offline page shows, and some of the issues have been solved. But the overriding problem is that there still isn’t a good overall control mechanism for asset caching and custom network requests. The previous attempt — AppCache — seemed to be a good idea because it allowed you to specify assets to cache really easily. However, it made many assumptions about what you were trying to do and then broke horribly when your app didn’t follow those assumptions exactly. Read Jake Archibald's Application Cache is a Douchebag for more details.