[whatwg] RFC: Alternatives to storage mutex for cookies and localStorage

[Jeremy Orlow]

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 5:53 PM, Anne van Kesteren <annevk at opera.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 04 Sep 2009 09:02:45 +0200, Chris Jones <cjones at mozilla.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Feedback very much desired.
>>
>
> I'm not really sure what to say other than that I'm not at all a fan of a
> change that breaks existing deployments. I thought that was a pretty clear
> outcome from last time we went about this. I also thought it was pretty
> clear we wanted the burden to be on user agents. (I also recall, but am not
> a 100% sure, that developers from Mozilla agreed to this, even though it
> would be hard to make it all work in Gecko.)
>

I believe this opinion was expressed by people who hadn't yet tried to do it
in a web browser with multiple event loops.  :-)

A bunch of us working on Chromium have spent a lot of time
thinking about this and I don't think it's just a matter of burdening user
agents.  I think it's pretty clear that the spec, as is, is not possible to
implement without making it trivial for a single website to lock up all of
your event loops....which is a major step back in terms of browser
performance...especially in this multi-core world we now live in.  :-)

This is especially true if the storage mutex extends to cookies since one
tab running a poorly written site can lock everything up.  And it sounds
like, because of that, no one is going to implement the storage mutex for
cookies per the spec.  I really do think it's time to discuss alternatives.
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