Web Workers
From RuntimeWiki
Web Workers is a new feature within HTML5 that provides an API that allows Web application authors to spawn background workers running scripts in parallel to their main page. This allows for thread-like operation with message-passing as the coordination mechanism. Web Workers transform the browser from a single-threaded development platform into a multi-threaded environment. Computationally-intensive operations can happen in a background thread, thereby leaving the web application's UI available for user interaction. Network communication can also happen in a background thread. The design of Web Workers takes into account security concerns in that background threads are isolated from other threads and the main browser page.
The latest spec is at:
Web Workers builds on the WorkerPool technology within the Google Gears platform. For the most part, Web Workers represents industry standardization at W3C of the WorkerPool feature from Gears.
Web Workers are supported in Firefox 3.5, Safari 4 and Chrome 3.
