<div>It sounds like most of the concerns are about the 2nd part of this proposal: allowing a background page to continue running after the visible page has been closed.</div><div><br></div><div>However, the first part sounds like it alone would be useful to web applications like GMail:</div>
<div><br></div><div><blockquote class="webkit-indent-blockquote" style="margin: 0 0 0 40px; border: none; padding: 0px;">The first, which should be<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; border-collapse: collapse; ">generally useful, is the ability to have a hidden HTML/JS page running<br>
in the background that can access the DOM of visible windows. This<br>page should be accessible from windows that the user navigates to. We<br>call this background Javascript window a "shared context" or a<br>"background page". This will enable multiple instances of a web app<br>
(e.g. tearoff windows in Gmail) to cleanly access the same user state<br>no matter which windows are open.</span></blockquote></div><div><br></div><div>+ restrict things to the same security origin.</div><div><br></div><div>
It sounds similar in concept to a share worker except that it runs in the main thread and is more concerned with dom manipulation/state while workers have typically been thought of as allowing background processing.</div>
<div><br></div><div>It seems that the lifetime of this could be scoped, so that it dies when it isn't referenced (in a similar way to how shared worker lifetime is scoped).</div><div><br></div><div>Dave</div><div><br>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 6:39 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mjs@apple.com">mjs@apple.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div class="im"><br>
On Jul 27, 2009, at 7:13 PM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:<br>
<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
I'm not clear how the UI requirements here are different from<br>
persistent workers, though. Those also persist after the user<br>
navigates away, right?<br>
</blockquote>
<br></div>
Persistent workers are even more of a security risk, since they are supposed to persist even after the browser has been restarted, or after the system has been rebooted. Persistent workers should be renamed to "BotNet Construction Kit".<br>
<br>
Regards,<br><font color="#888888">
Maciej<br>
<br>
</font></blockquote></div><br></div>