WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

> and making a whole new web browser from the ground up is effectively impossible because the browsers vendors have weaponized web standards complexity against any newcomers

I would argue the exact opposite. Web standards have steadily increased in quality. The web has become much less quirky over the years and you no longer need to emulate broken browsers in order to get a functional browsing experience.

Building a web browser is hard, but it's not impossible. Just look at how much progress Ladybird has made in a year. If Ladybird isn't an existence proof I don't know what would qualify.

Our industry as a whole is way too willing to put up with broken software for literal decades because building a better version is believed to be impossible. And that's how we end up squandering endless (volunteer) resources to marginally improve old projects that essentially have no future.

We can have a better future, but only if we choose to build it. As Henry Ford said: "Whether you think you can, or you think you can't – you're right."

It was a thing before Chrome/WebKit became the "only" browser. People mention Firefox but last time I checked its market share is in the single digit.

Java applets are back wohoo.

It seems most people here are concerned about the readability of web content. Text is already gone with SPAs and React. The only reason we still have an index-able web is because of Google and websites still want to get indexed and ranked. In fact, I'd say Wasm is probably better for text since now you have to provide text in a raw format (ie: JSON) for it to be linked/indexed which is much better than trying to crawl incomprehensible HTML.

I'd say the biggest bottleneck for WASM adoption is the current "establishment" of computing. In order to serve a simple web application, you need an Operating System, Networking stack, a Web Server, a language interpreter, etc... With WASM, all of this disappears and get abstracted away behind a single (or few) solutions. Instead of paying for a full virtual machine to process a few web requests that sits idly for 90% of the time, you only pay for CPU time when your worker is computing stuff (Durable Objects).

There is little incentive for the industry as a whole to move to this model since the end user is the one who is paying for all of this compute. Maybe the Chinese will figure this out and finally push toward that direction.