Depending on the how much cross talk there would be between the threads, web workers might not be adequate for some algorithms anyway as the message passing (the only way web workers can communicate, there is no "shared memory" access or other such short cuts to communication) could add noticeable latency. Caveat: I've not used them for anything myself so I don't know if any such latency is large enough to be an issue.
You can create multi-threaded code using web workers, but you exclude your app from browsers that don't support them. The major laggard on the desktop is IE, which is due to gain support for them in version 10. As far as I know the only current mobile browser that supports them is Safari under iOS5, apparently they were present in Android's browser but removed/disabled in recent releases.