Buksy’s answer is correct but in my opinion it does not answer the original question, namely: “What can service workers do that web workers cannot? Or vice versa?” There are fundamental differences in their lifecycle and the number of instances per origin you can have. In short: | Web Workers | Service Workers | |————–|————–|——————| … Read more
I don’t have hard facts, but since you asked for opinions… 🙂 There is a telling issue in Chrome: Too many Web Workers can cause a silent crash (caps ~60-100, according to this bug report). The general problem is Web Workers are resource intensive, at least with v8. Assuming you’re going to end up making … Read more
tl;dr: include this script before jQuery JQuery initally accesses lots of document properties to check for browser features. document is not defined in Worker and you actually cannot create Document instance in web workers at this moment. JQuery isn’t prepared for that – as you could see in comments on your question, nobody seems to … Read more
Web Workers. They’re a W3C standard (well, a working draft at the moment) for exactly this, and require no plugins: This specification defines an API that allows Web application authors to spawn background workers running scripts in parallel to their main page. The specification also discusses spreading workers across multiple cores, for true concurrency (this … Read more
UPDATE Modern versions of Chrome, Edge, and Firefox now support SharedArrayBuffers (though not safari at the time of this writing see SharedArrayBuffers on MDN), so that would be another possibility for a fast transfer of data with a different set of trade offs compared to a transferrable (you can see MDN for all the trade … Read more
This is misunderstanding of the definition of web server — it should only be used to “talk” with clients. Heavy load tasks should be delegated to standalone programs (that of course can be also written in JS). You’d probably say that it is dirty, but I assure you that a web server process stuck in … Read more
Is there some other way to turn a byte array into something you can feed to drawImage? You can post the ArrayBuffer of Uint8ClampedArray object to main thread; at main thread substitute using .putImageData() for .drawImage(). As indicated by @Kaiido, it is not necessary to create an ImageData object at Worker var imgBytes = new … Read more
I have done some testing to find out the answer to this in practice. Firefox does not yet support creating WebSocket connections from Web Workers: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=504553 So Firefox is not relevant until that bug is resolved. IE 10 doesn’t have support for Shared Web Workers so it’s not relevant either. So that leaves Chrome. Here … Read more
No you cannot. There’s no access to non-thread safe components or the DOM and you have to pass specific data in and out of a thread through serialized objects. So you have to work really hard to cause problems in your code. jQuery is a JavaScript DOM library. But you can use a native XMLHttpRequest … Read more
After seeing this question, I’ve finally implemented sharing socket and added to my library a few days ago. It seems to work in most of browsers including even in IE6, but except Opera. For Opera, you may use regular checking instead of unload event. Check releated issue at https://github.com/flowersinthesand/portal/issues/21 ###Leaving a cookie Set cookie to … Read more