Getting Things Done in the Background with Web Workers

A Guide to Utilizing Web Workers for Smooth Multi-Threading in JavaScript

Photo by Yulia Matvienko on Unsplash

Ever experienced a website that freezes up when running intensive JavaScript? Things like complex calculations, visual animations, or loading data can lock up the main UI thread, leading to an unresponsive page. Thankfully, web workers provide a solution — allowing us to run scripts in a separate thread without blocking user interactions.

In this guide, we’ll explore what web workers are, why they’re useful, and how to create and communicate with them for smooth multi-threaded JavaScript.

What are Web Workers?

Web workers provide a simple way to run a script operation in a background thread separate from the main execution thread. This allows intensive processing to happen behind the scenes without blocking UI rendering or input handling.

Some key things to know about web workers:

• Run on separate threads from the main JS thread
• Cannot directly access the DOM or other JS objects
• Communicate via asynchronous messages
• Great for computationally heavy tasks
• Supported in all modern browsers