Notes on web workers

How It Relates to OS Thread?

The Worker interface spawns real OS-level threads, and mindful programmers may be concerned that concurrency can cause “interesting” effects in your code if you aren't careful.

However, since web workers have carefully controlled communication points with other threads, it's actually very hard to cause concurrency problems. There's no access to non-threadsafe 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.

Content Security Issues

Workers are considered to have their own execution context, distinct from the document that created them. For this reason they are, in general, not governed by the content security policy of the document (or parent worker) that created them. 

To specify a content security policy for the worker, set a Content-Security-Policy response header for the request which delivered the worker script itself.
The exception to this is if the worker script's origin is a globally unique identifier (for example, if its URL has a scheme of data or blob). In this case, the worker does inherit the CSP of the document or worker that created it.

Transferring data to and from workers: COPY

Data passed between the main page and workers is copied, not shared. Objects are serialized as they're handed to the worker, and subsequently, de-serialized on the other end. The page and worker do not share the same instance, so the end result is that a duplicate is created on each end. Most browsers implement this feature as structured cloning.

Google Chrome 17+ and Firefox 18+ contain an additional way to pass certain types of objects (transferable objects, that is objects implementing the Transferable interface) to or from a worker with high performance.