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The whole thing issue was that it had to run in IE8.

setImmediate is not supported in IE8 either.

The polyfill implements setImmediate using postMessage in IE8, though. AFAIK it's not really possible to polyfill WebWorkers.

You can sort of polyfill web workers by providing the same API but running the web worker in the main thread.

Edit: I assume I'm being downvoted because you're still running the script in the main thread, and therefore lose the concurrency. Obviously this is an issue with a polyfill, but the point of polyfilling web workers would be to keep the one codebase rather than writing your your web app with and then without web workers.

Which misses the point entirely. The problem the author had was doing sorting of many items in IE8 without a warning. Using a real web worker would be a solution, but using a web worker polyfill that ran in the main thread would put him right back where he started, with IE8 triggering a warning.

I wasn't clear enough: I'd be polyfilling web workers not for this specific problem, but for other cases where I could use web workers and not lose IE8 support.

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