State of SharedWorker?

[cesarandreu]

Missing browser support:

• Webkit had an implementation that was removed fairly quickly. Looking through their bug tracker, there's a single untouched issue about reinstating support.
• Edge status says it's not currently planned.
• caniuse shows it's not supported on android.

There's a previous issue discussing deprecating SharedWorker, but it's currently locked. Since it took place two years ago, I thought it worth asking if anything has changed since then? I'd love to see it on every browser, but it's not looking very likely. ServiceWorker appears to have more attention and developer interest, and there seems to be some overlap in functionality.

[wanderview]

SharedWorker and ServiceWorker are really pretty different. In the future we would like to expose SharedWorker from ServiceWorker globals to support use cases that need shared global state.

At the 2016 service worker spec meeting in Toronto Apple indicated they would consider shipping SharedWorker again if it helped fix some of the issues with global state in service workers.

In my personal opinion it seems web workers are just now taking off in the js community. See recent experiments by frameworks like preact and others to do virtual DOM work in Workers to avoid main thread jank. I think its still early to write off SharedWorkers.

[annevk]

Sounds like shared workers will stack around for a while longer. I've closed the older issue and will close this as a duplicate of #315. Thanks for re-raising it.