WebAssembly Ends Browser Preview With Initial API & Binary Format

[starshipeleven]

We are in a era where web browsers will replace desktop environments slowly. If WASM is anything successfull we will be running games through the web browser as well. Everything neatly integerated into SystemD and efficient. SystemWASM is born within a few years. SnappWASM for running offline apps.

Come on... stop pulling up systemd where it does not belong. We get you hate it, but this is just stupid.

[Michael_S]

anyone want to weigh in with a prediction of the first root-kitting-by-WebAssembly-drive-by?

I'll give it 4 hours after the first general release of a browser which supports it and the great unwashed public start upgrading to it

The initial WebAssembly implementations are in Javascript, so any vulnerability of WebAssembly is a vulnerability in your browser's Javascript engine that can be exploited without WebAssembly.

[speculatrix]

anyone want to weigh in with a prediction of the first root-kitting-by-WebAssembly-drive-by?

I'll give it 4 hours after the first general release of a browser which supports it and the great unwashed public start upgrading to it

[cj.wijtmans]

Seconded.

I think yszolt has a valid objection - native apps are more efficient. But the problem is, the native apps 99% of the world is using right now work on Windows, OS X, iOS, and Android. If we shift to more native apps, that just makes it harder for people to move to open source operating systems or even from Windows to OS X or vice versa.

The hope for WebAssembly is that its performance is good enough for wide adoption, and then users can switch between any operating system that has a modern browser without losing their favorite applications. And since Mozilla's asm.js was in 2-3x of C for speed, I suspect WebAssembly will be good enough.

We are in a era where web browsers will replace desktop environments slowly. If WASM is anything successfull we will be running games through the web browser as well. Everything neatly integerated into SystemD and efficient. SystemWASM is born within a few years. SnappWASM for running offline apps.

[Michael_S]

Then you also get finally cross-platform applications so MS, Apple and the like can go fuck themselves, but I guess that this is an unplanned side effect of the above.

Seconded.

I think yszolt has a valid objection - native apps are more efficient. But the problem is, the native apps 99% of the world is using right now work on Windows, OS X, iOS, and Android. If we shift to more native apps, that just makes it harder for people to move to open source operating systems or even from Windows to OS X or vice versa.

The hope for WebAssembly is that its performance is good enough for wide adoption, and then users can switch between any operating system that has a modern browser without losing their favorite applications. And since Mozilla's asm.js was in 2-3x of C for speed, I suspect WebAssembly will be good enough.

[mr_tawan]

It would be great if we can replace js file with wasm (eg. .... jQuery in wasm instead of javascript). Many developers do not want to expose their code to users to many reason (IP, security, etc.).

[Kushan]

Do we really need this? So much wasted energy on an inherently slow and insecure ecosystem... I mean, they always show games and stuff in the examples, but who does serious work/gaming in the browser? Web ports of known apps usually sucks, and since the emerge of the CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) it has spread like a plague (Atom, Spotify, Skype on Linux, GitKraken, Slack, etc.), so you can't really escape them, because even the "desktop" apps are built with these horribly inefficient technologies. Slow startup times, dead simple apps using hundreds of megabytes of memory, sloppy interfaces and so on. I think that web and desktop apps will converge somewhere in the future, just not with the current technologies. At least I hope so...

It's not for running desktop software in the browser. It's for having similar performance to desktop/native code.

It means next time you use javascript-framework-of-the-day, it doesn't have to be built WITH Javascript.

[starshipeleven]

Do we really need this? So much wasted energy on an inherently slow and insecure ecosystem... I mean, they always show games and stuff in the examples, but who does serious work/gaming in the browser?

It's not gaming, you dummy. It's more ads. Web needs more ads and browsers must be more powerful to run more, better, more powerful, integrated and user-tracking ads.

Then you also get finally cross-platform applications so MS, Apple and the like can go fuck themselves, but I guess that this is an unplanned side effect of the above.

[theghost]

Hey, nice finally binary support in browser...~.~

[jKicker]

Do we really need this? So much wasted energy on an inherently slow and insecure ecosystem... I mean, they always show games and stuff in the examples, but who does serious work/gaming in the browser? Web ports of known apps usually sucks, and since the emerge of the CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) it has spread like a plague (Atom, Spotify, Skype on Linux, GitKraken, Slack, etc.), so you can't really escape them, because even the "desktop" apps are built with these horribly inefficient technologies. Slow startup times, dead simple apps using hundreds of megabytes of memory, sloppy interfaces and so on. I think that web and desktop apps will converge somewhere in the future, just not with the current technologies. At least I hope so...

Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Apple among the others disagree with you. This improves on what we have to get near native speed among the other things. You can't just create something completely new and expect everyone to use it https://xkcd.com/927