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Comment by robmil | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately they're not supported in IE9 or below, which this article oddly fails to mention. So a more accurate title might be "make your UI more responsive for ~60% of your users with HTML5 web workers".

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Browser marketshare is not a constant, it totally depends of your business. At my current job it's:

  - ~55% Chrome
  - ~35% Firefox
  - ~5% Safari
  - 1.5% IE 9+10
  - 1% Opera

So for us it make sense to use API even less supported than WebWorkers, like http://caniuse.com/pagevisibility

But if I was working for a chinese market place, or a bank intranet I'm sure it would be 80% IE6.

I think this is the case for nearly every technology, new, or old, and although they wouldn't be amiss to mention it, 60% is a lot better than a lot of other techniques which get mentioned here.

Oh, absolutely. Web workers are awesome and hopefully the future, but it seems a bit disingenuous not to mention the huge caveat that currently prevents their being adopted in a more widespread way.

Sadly, can't even use it for cross-platform packaged apps (min requirement: chromium, iOS browser, android browser) because the android removed support after 2.1.

Chrome for Android supports web workers

There are a couple of polyfills available for Web Workers

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