<story><title>W3C recommends WebAssembly</title><url>https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/8123</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>EvanAnderson</author><text>Even if we don&amp;#x27;t lose the HTML-centered model, we are probably going to lose control of our browsers. Eventually somebody is going to ship a product that&amp;#x27;s nothing more than a browser implemented in WASM that runs inside your browser. The &amp;quot;inner browser&amp;quot; won&amp;#x27;t have content filtering, privacy controls, DOM inspector, or a Javascript debugger (for the Javascript engine running on the &amp;quot;inner browser&amp;quot;) that you can interact with. You&amp;#x27;ll have to agree to let them run arbitrary code on your machine to even view the &amp;quot;website&amp;quot;. There will be no &amp;quot;browse w&amp;#x2F;o Javascript&amp;quot; option in that future.&lt;p&gt;The kind of jerks who liked adding Javascript to block right-clicking, blocking &amp;quot;Paste&amp;quot; into password fields, etc, are going to absolutely love using the browser-in-a-browser product to deliver their &amp;quot;website&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;For the inevitable replies: Yes-- you can already do this with minified Javascript. WASM, being targeted for performance, is just going to make this kind of asshattery faster.</text></item><item><author>6gvONxR4sf7o</author><text>Whatever you think about javascript, I love the historic separation between content and interactivity. I dislike that so many static pages won&amp;#x27;t load without JS and that we&amp;#x27;re moving further in that direction. I hope the evolution towards &amp;quot;browser as OS&amp;quot; doesn&amp;#x27;t hurt the content vs interactivity separation. Could we ever lose the HTML centered model?&lt;p&gt;That could mean we lose hackability and the ability to write extensions or even scrape the web without a BigCo webcrawler&amp;#x27;s level of infra investment. Is everything going to turn into an opaque single page app? Technically, webassembly is really cool, but I worry about where the browser is headed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mahidhar</author><text>Unfortunately, I must agree with you that there are definitely some very troubling implications to how WebAssembly might be used to build more effective walled gardens on the web.&lt;p&gt;I can easily imagine a &amp;quot;platform&amp;quot; WASM module which acts as a runtime for other WASM modules built by &amp;quot;app&amp;quot; developers. This Platform module can be easily cached by FAANG or other big commercial interests, similar to AMP by Google (maybe even be pre-bundled into the browser?). The only way to discover, download and run these other apps is through this curated Platform module. All this could be rendered through something like the Canvas API instead of the DOM, which again is managed on a low level by the Platform and in turn exposes higher level API&amp;#x27;s for the Apps. The Platform also has built in support for Ad networks, tracking, etc., which cannot be disabled without disabling the whole ecosystem of apps. And of course, like any good play&amp;#x2F;app store, it is completely incompatible with anything else, leading to new levels of Balkanization of the web.&lt;p&gt;I hope that this isn&amp;#x27;t the case, and I&amp;#x27;m completely wrong about this. But I just can&amp;#x27;t shake the feeling that as a community, we are championing WebAssembly as purely a performance win, without considering how big commercial interests might seek to exploit this new technology.&lt;p&gt;Edit: typo with AMP</text></comment>
<story><title>W3C recommends WebAssembly</title><url>https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/8123</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>EvanAnderson</author><text>Even if we don&amp;#x27;t lose the HTML-centered model, we are probably going to lose control of our browsers. Eventually somebody is going to ship a product that&amp;#x27;s nothing more than a browser implemented in WASM that runs inside your browser. The &amp;quot;inner browser&amp;quot; won&amp;#x27;t have content filtering, privacy controls, DOM inspector, or a Javascript debugger (for the Javascript engine running on the &amp;quot;inner browser&amp;quot;) that you can interact with. You&amp;#x27;ll have to agree to let them run arbitrary code on your machine to even view the &amp;quot;website&amp;quot;. There will be no &amp;quot;browse w&amp;#x2F;o Javascript&amp;quot; option in that future.&lt;p&gt;The kind of jerks who liked adding Javascript to block right-clicking, blocking &amp;quot;Paste&amp;quot; into password fields, etc, are going to absolutely love using the browser-in-a-browser product to deliver their &amp;quot;website&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;For the inevitable replies: Yes-- you can already do this with minified Javascript. WASM, being targeted for performance, is just going to make this kind of asshattery faster.</text></item><item><author>6gvONxR4sf7o</author><text>Whatever you think about javascript, I love the historic separation between content and interactivity. I dislike that so many static pages won&amp;#x27;t load without JS and that we&amp;#x27;re moving further in that direction. I hope the evolution towards &amp;quot;browser as OS&amp;quot; doesn&amp;#x27;t hurt the content vs interactivity separation. Could we ever lose the HTML centered model?&lt;p&gt;That could mean we lose hackability and the ability to write extensions or even scrape the web without a BigCo webcrawler&amp;#x27;s level of infra investment. Is everything going to turn into an opaque single page app? Technically, webassembly is really cool, but I worry about where the browser is headed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>IvanK_net</author><text>It makes no sense to me. You are saying, that instead a 5 kB webpage, you would load 50 MB code, which emulates a browser, just to show you the same webpage?&lt;p&gt;Every webpage pays for the traffic in some way, and everybody tries to save web traffic as much as possible (optimizing images, videos, minifying JS, CSS ...). It makes no sense to expect, that websites would turn the opposite way just for fun.&lt;p&gt;I would be very glad, if you can emulate a computer in a browser, so you can e.g. use VirtualBox or VMWare comfortably in your browser. Still, it will be sandboxed (it can not turn off your computer, or clear your hard drive, etc.).&lt;p&gt;I think the web is the most open, independent, secure and versatile platform today. And I hope it will become even better and more powerful in the future.</text></comment>