On the set up: First, there are 3 major engines, and even if Gecko dies there will be two. Second, both users and developers want a more capable web. Don't blame browser vendors for giving it to them. The web is wildly successful because of its continued evolution, and if it stopped evolving, native mobile apps would have beaten the web back even more.
WASM could indeed make for a simple, yet powerful, web-like platform, and I hope to see this! But a lot of the new web capabilities would still need to be there. All of the I/O bits of the modern web: networking protocols, GPU, USB, MIDI, local storage, filesystem, etc. WASM doesn't make the need for that go away. Those things still need to be there as WASI services or similar.
And I hope that such a WASM-based browser would not throw out a markup document completely. Flutter did this and it just isn't the web anymore. Documents and links are critical to being able to build useful services on top of the web.
I want to keep the web web-like, not just have Flutter but WASM instead of Dart.
> WASM could indeed make for a simple, yet powerful, web-like platform, and I hope to see this!
Careful what you wish for. WASM-rendered pages could spell the end of ad-blockers and other extensions that modify or read page content. You'll have only binary blobs being downloaded rendering something on a canvas surface.
That is in theory already possible today, also just with obfuscated js blobs.
But the way the ad networks work, is that they do dynamic content loading. So knowing where the ads are coming from and just blocking those lists will continue to work also in WASM.
But indeed, modifying the content specifically, when all you have is a canvas, will be close to impossible.
On the set up: First, there are 3 major engines, and even if Gecko dies there will be two. Second, both users and developers want a more capable web. Don't blame browser vendors for giving it to them. The web is wildly successful because of its continued evolution, and if it stopped evolving, native mobile apps would have beaten the web back even more.
WASM could indeed make for a simple, yet powerful, web-like platform, and I hope to see this! But a lot of the new web capabilities would still need to be there. All of the I/O bits of the modern web: networking protocols, GPU, USB, MIDI, local storage, filesystem, etc. WASM doesn't make the need for that go away. Those things still need to be there as WASI services or similar.
And I hope that such a WASM-based browser would not throw out a markup document completely. Flutter did this and it just isn't the web anymore. Documents and links are critical to being able to build useful services on top of the web.
I want to keep the web web-like, not just have Flutter but WASM instead of Dart.