For a long time, SharedWorker has been disabled on Android due to concerns about its unpredictable process lifecycle. We believed that SharedWorker instances might terminate unexpectedly, without noticing to users or web developers, which we considered unacceptable. However, a recent discussion on GitHub (https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11205) suggests that the unpredictable nature of SharedWorker's process lifecycle might not be as significant an issue as we once thought. Based on this, we plan to re-enable SharedWorker on Android while simultaneously investigating this behavior to ensure a stable and reliable experience.
The long-standing demand for SharedWorker support on Android stems from several needs expressed by web developers: - Resource Sharing and Efficiency: Developers aim to share a single WebSocket or Server-Sent Events (SSE) connection across multiple tabs, thereby conserving resources. - Persistent Resource Management: There's a strong desire to share and persist resources across tabs, particularly for technologies like WASM-based SQLite. - Closing a Feature Gap: It has been noted that other major mobile browsers, including Safari on iOS and Firefox on Android, already support SharedWorker, making Chrome on Android the last major browser to address this gap.