Is WebAssembly the Return of Java Applets and Flash? (2018)

https://steveklabnik.com/writing/is-webassembly-the-return-of-java-applets-flash

by nequo • 2 years ago

6 2 2 years ago

I had no idea Steve called it so early.

One can absolutely keep a webful experience with webassembly. But there's a huge drive of "Towards a Modern Web Stack" people who want to use Canvas and raw input processing to build their own engines, ignore the web completely & do everything themselves. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC...

They value the web only from the developer perspective, for what they can build. The user agency of the web is irrelevant. It's such a Applet/Flash/Native vibe.

pjmlp• 2 years ago

It was obvious since the beginning, WebAssembly is after all the political child out of the plugins and applet wars, Mozilla not willing to adopt PNaCL, pushing asm.js instead, and everyone agreed on WebAssembly instead.

Ironically, Chrome is the one with best WebAssembly support, and Firefox hardly matters now.

Is WebAssembly the Return of Java Applets and Flash? (2018)

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