I was inspired by how linear.app was able to feel native and has killer offline support.
On 8th September 2025, I decided to take a look under the hood.
I knew how their infamous sync engine works. TL;DR - it stores the recent data in IndexDB. But, I was more interested in finding how the application navigates between pages & is able to work offline effortlessly.
They leverage two clever techniques:
The first page is loaded as is, although every single page after that is greedily preloaded. It does increase first load time, although for an application like Linear, that's a workable tradeoff.
Especially, combined with the next step.
They use a clever technique where they store even their chunked javascript bundles in the service worker. Given that it'll rarely change unless there are updates, this is pretty smart.
Based on this, I have created a project which combines tanstack and workbox to achive similar functionality.
Deployed version is available here: