Re:Chrome browser for businesses
by wcummings on Thursday December 29, 2016 @06:30AM
(#13276782)
But (most) browser apps are single threaded and you can block the UI if you do anything intensive on the client-side.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
There quite a few ways around that with async APIs and WebWorkers, even ServiceWorkers now. A lot of devs just don't use them properly.
Edit: Did you mean the browser itself could freeze? That's a thing of the past with Firefox being the last browser to separate the content and chrome process. So the web page may freeze, the browser window itself shouldn't.
Those are relatively new features, and aren't used a whole lot.
WebWorkers are not a new "feature". The last browser to support it was (on desktop) IE in v10 (4 years ago) and on mobile Android 4.4 (3 years ago). Though that doesn't really matter since you can polyfill it, which obviously does not give you multithreading in those older browsers but it still forces you to think async.
Regarding other APIs, a great number has been available since many years, and any newly introduced API since at least 5 years is either non-blocking or async.