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The computer industry is experiencing a major shift: improved single processor performance via higher clock rates has reached its technical limits due to overheating. Fortunately, Moore's law still holds, so chip makers use transistors to boost performance through parallelism in multicore and manycore processors. However, exploiting the full potential of these processors requires parallel programming. Thus, a large number of developers need to parallelize desktop applications, including browsers, business applications, media processing, and other domain-specific applications. This is likely to result in the largest rewrite of software in the history of the desktop. To be successful, systematic engineering principles must be applied to parallelize performance-critical applications and environments. In light of these developments, we're pleased to present this special issue on programming methods, tools, and libraries for parallelizing desktop applications. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]