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Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly

blog.chromium.org

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Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly

#61

Post by nerpderp83 »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #22
irrational wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, we were looking at browser stats for our website today and during the last 30 days 20% of our distinct users were using IE 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, or 11. Of course most were on IE 11, but when you still have a significant number of people still using ancient versions of IE, I despair at ever being able to use modern web technologies.

The only way to move forward is to ignore them. Put up a message that advises to install Chrome or Firefox and get rid of all the cruft that supports browsers older than 5 years. Most probably already have a modern browser installed but use IE out of habit. I see it at large corporations all the time. I even heard "I wish it would remind me to just use Chrome"

Chrome and Firefox probably dont run on their OS.

Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly

#62

Post by wcummings »

eeZi wrote: post #21

This one I'm fine with since WebAssembly is a worthy replacement, but I'm still annoyed at Google discontinuing Chrome Apps. Some examples of specialized apps I use all the time that would require a native app otherwise: - Signal Desktop - TeamViewer - Postman - SSH client - Cleanflight drone configuration tool It was one of the best things that happened to Linux desktops in a long time and removing it hurts users an…

Why are you using an SSH client in your web browser?

Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly

#63

Post by eeZi »

wcummings wrote: post #62
eeZi wrote: post #21

This one I'm fine with since WebAssembly is a worthy replacement, but I'm still annoyed at Google discontinuing Chrome Apps. Some examples of specialized apps I use all the time that would require a native app otherwise: - Signal Desktop - TeamViewer - Postman - SSH client - Cleanflight drone configuration tool It was one of the best things that happened to Linux desktops in a long time and removing it hurts users an…

Why are you using an SSH client in your web browser?

Chrome OS has no native SSH client, but Google published a NaCL based SSH client:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec...

It's useful outside of Chrome OS if you have a security perimeter based on TLS with ACLs and auditing already in place and you want to use it for SSH as well:

https://github.com/zyclonite/nassh-relay

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/assets...

Google uses a similar setup internally.

Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly

#64

Post by wcummings »

eeZi wrote: post #63
wcummings wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you using an SSH client in your web browser?

Chrome OS has no native SSH client, but Google published a NaCL based SSH client: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec... It's useful outside of Chrome OS if you have a security perimeter based on TLS with ACLs and auditing already in place and you want to use it for SSH as well: https://github.com/zyclonite/nassh-relay https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/assets... Google use…

I wouldn't call it a "Linux Desktop" if you can't run a standard SSH client. Chrome OS is it's own beast.

Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly

#65

Post by lvh »

eriknstr wrote: post #53
kuschku wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if that VM ran on over 2 billion devices, on every toaster out there? In the end, this all is just reinventing the JVM, in slower, but more secure.

I think that's what parent commenter was implying. (However, I don't agree. I remember the horrible Java applets and I am thankful that I pretty much never encounter any of them these days.)

Is the horribleness of applets intrinsic in the concept of a common target?

Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly

#66

Post by dasmoth »

camus2 wrote: post #54
coolmitch wrote: post #11

As a web developer working primarily in JS, what should I be learning now to stay relevant/up-to-date once WebAssembly is more common? Are we going to see more web stuff built with c++, like the dsp example in this blog post?

WebAssembly is a medium for ASM.js apps, and ASM.js apps are mainly C and C++ . You have to learn C and C++ period.

Right now, that's probably the best way to go if you're keen to build non-trivial wasm stuff, but I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that it'll stay that way. There's a Rust implementation now, for instance. And some talk of better support for garbage collected languages.

Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly

#67

Post by duskwuff »

marcosdumay wrote: post #41
Crontab wrote: post #24

Is WebAssembley going to turn into yet another web technology that can be used by websites in order to track us or to annoy us with advertising? I'm asking because every time something new is introduced, it feels like it ends up being used to abuse users (Javascript, XSS, Cookies, HTML5 Video).

It doesn't do anything that Javascript didn't already do. By the way, why do you think HTML5 is a problem?

The suggestion I got was that "HTML5 Video" was the subject. Which still doesn't make sense; the alternatives which it replaced (Flash, QuickTime, WMV, Java-based video players...) were all radically worse, and much more abuseable.

Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly

#68

Post by douche »

kuschku wrote: post #48
marcosdumay wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Wouldn't it be great if they just created a simple VM with well specified bytecode so that we could push the complexity into our tooling and just compile into the standard target?

And if that VM ran on over 2 billion devices, on every toaster out there? In the end, this all is just reinventing the JVM, in slower, but more secure.

> In the end, this all is just reinventing the JVM, in slower, but more secure

More secure?

Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly

#69

Post by eeZi »

wcummings wrote: post #64
eeZi wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome OS has no native SSH client, but Google published a NaCL based SSH client: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec... It's useful outside of Chrome OS if you have a security perimeter based on TLS with ACLs and auditing already in place and you want to use it for SSH as well: https://github.com/zyclonite/nassh-relay https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/assets... Google use…

I wouldn't call it a "Linux Desktop" if you can't run a standard SSH client. Chrome OS is it's own beast.

Agreed, the SSH client is a bit of an outlier since you have that natively.

I still listed it for completeness, I do use it, after all.

Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly

#70

Post by johncolanduoni »

_wmd wrote: post #25

The most material result of this is that Chromebooks won't have a working SSH client starting sometime next year, because WebAssembly can't do real sockets without an external proxy.

That's largely orthogonal to this switch. WebAssembly can't actually do anything except for compute and access whatever its embedder exposes. As others have mentioned JavaScript ChromeOS apps have this API available, so WebAssembly running in that context will be able to access it.
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