I would like to add my voice to the request to block all service workers.
It would be nice to have a checkbox right in
brave://serviceworker-internals
as well as a setting in
brave://flags
so it would be searchable and familiar to Firefox users who have set dom.serviceWorkers.enabled to false.
On my Windows 7 system, I typically run three or more browsers at a time (one or two for VPN, others for particular extensions, other features, or just testing) so these service workers can quickly fill my 16Gb of system ram. (I regularly got the close programs dialogue to free memory before unregistering service workers.) On my Chromebooks, I’ve been wondering why for months, my system was hanging so badly that my trackpad cursor was unresponsive or extremely sluggish, until I unregistered all my service workers and installed the Block Service Workers extension, which by the way runs fine in Brave as well. I’ve also noticed that my available ram now runs between .1 and .5 Gb free instead of between 0 and .1 on my Chromebooks.
Windows 10 seems to be a bit better at the virtual memory and process management, but it may also be I just don’t do as much surfing there as on my Win7 and ChromeOS devices.
Constant desktop notifications for every major new site visited are an annoying downside to using the Block Service Workers extension, as most sites, if not all, install their own service worker. These things are getting to be like the toolbars major web sites encouraged visitors to install that bogged so many computers down in the early days of the Internet. If you allow a site to use desktop notifications, their service worker can then launch every time with your browser, even if you don’t visit the site again for months, and nag you with desktop notification ads, or worse hijack your CPU or bandwidth with things like cyrptocurrency miners or BOTS.
I understand browser developers don’t expect the end user to understand the cost/benefits of service workers, but injecting code with out authorization is a fundamental breach of local system control. Even though each individual service worker may be well written and free of memory leaks, the sheer number of them eventually taxes system resources on typical systems (esp. thin client systems like netbooks and Chromebooks).
My motto is now: "Service workers in my browser are like barnacles on my Internet surfboard."