Without DOM it's not really that exciting.
WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers
141–150 of 346 posts
Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers
#142Great. We will soon have an entire JVM running inside each browser's tab, just to run an animated slider. Maybe even more than one. Plus a .NET VM, several Python and Ruby interpreters, and so on. Because webmasters will keep loading ready-made plugins from CDNs, exactly like they are doing now, except that the new generation of web software will carry their own interpreter or runtime with them, because the developer…
I'd like to interject for a moment here, and pitch my idea about what I call the "Web 4.0". It's basically a binary equivalent of HTML, without the many inconveniences of HTML for content providers. Web 4.0 pages are obfuscated WebAssembly payloads, that draw their contents via WebGL. This way, adblocking becomes impossible, as the actual content and ads are within the same opaque WebGL framebuffer. Stealing copyrigh…
> adblocking becomes impossible
No, it'd just take a sufficiently smart AI.
Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers
#143Unfortunately SIMD is still not supported on any browsers and with the move away from SIMD.js it looks like this might take a while. We've been working on porting over our fairly large barcode scanner library to WebAssembly. While the performance is close to what we have on other platforms ( http://websdk.scandit.com ), the major bottleneck for now is not being able to use optimized code relying on SIMD (and not havi…
Have you tested performance on older and lower spec devices? Does it still hold up?
On older mobile devices it can decrease significantly, but it's still much better then any known Javascript alternatives (e.g. quaggaJS) and works reasonably well even when only passing on a handful of frames/sec to the scanner library. (which happens on slower devices)
OTOH having SIMD would speed it up significantly and probably get them all up to speed.
Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd like to interject for a moment here, and pitch my idea about what I call the "Web 4.0". It's basically a binary equivalent of HTML, without the many inconveniences of HTML for content providers. Web 4.0 pages are obfuscated WebAssembly payloads, that draw their contents via WebGL. This way, adblocking becomes impossible, as the actual content and ads are within the same opaque WebGL framebuffer. Stealing copyrigh…
it'll also be harder to learn how things work... i wonder how much we've learned from reverse engineering the easy to read inline script tags... I definitely remember teaching myself JavaScript by reading blizzard.com's late 90s markup... figuring out that mouse over effect with onmouseover and onmouseout... works in ie4... but whats that strange bug in netscape 4..
You can't really do that today anymore though
Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers
#145I'm not as excited for this as I used to be. In most user applications JavaScript is good enough or better. If it wasn't then we wouldn't be taking the browser to make desktop applications. Recently I decided to make a desktop app and asked around about the different UI libraries. The answer I keep getting is "just use electron and JavaScript". Why? Because love it or hate it the Dom is fantastic and simple for makin…
>you can't beat JavaScript for manipulating the Dom.
Exactly. Only javascript can access attributes and call functions so good on exported document and window objects.
Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Seriously JS should not be the lingua franca of the web But neither should this. Really, keep your code off my computer as much as possible.
I think it's darkly humorous that I have to install browser plugins to stop sites from mining monero in my browser. It's like websites are those creepy spider things in the Matrix, except instead of sticking humans in pods to harvest their biochemical energy, they're just running up our home electricity bills by maxing our CPUs.
>maxing our CPUs.
And GPU too,
I recently saw that I do get frequent crashes on certain pages, it appears that somebody is putting empty ads that do SHAsum in the background with WebGL using vec4 and shaders!
Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers
#147„...all major browsers“ Is Internet Explorer not a major browser anymore? I’m talking relevant as in your webpage needs to work fine in Internet Explorer . For example, my company still has Internet Explorer configured as default browser as Edge is not compatible with some internal pages.
IE is not a major browser anymore http://gs.statcounter.com/ Look at your Google Analytics, it's really not that important anymore.
In corporate env it is.
Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this relevant what the people are aware of? If you drive a car do you need to be aware of its internals? WebAssembly looks like a safe, portable, intermediate bytecode. What's wrong with giving people more options (e.g. running native applications in their browsers)?
> If you drive a car do you need to be aware of its internals? You walked yourself into an obvious answer there: yes, to a limited extent you do. That includes understanding a bare minimum about tires, the engine (what noises are normal, what noises aren't normal), oil changing (why, when), windshield washer fluid, basic indications of electric problems, basics about the need to change brakes (indications of brakes g…
Continuing the comparison that means people need to understand not to cold power off the computer, not the specifics of CSS, JS and HTML. Note that cars are also going to be more and more abstracted away with automatic gear shifting (now I don't need to understand how gear shifting works). Do people really need to understand how CPU work to do their banking?
Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers
#149Without DOM it's not really that exciting.
There is a lot of processing that doesn't inherently need the DOM, and there's also server-side stuff as well. I think you'd be surprised!
Re: WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
SIMD is like the kids version of GLSL, which works today :)
Running anything with the GPU introduces a huge amount of latency, it only makes sense when you need high throughput and have large enough workloads to justify the latency. SIMD code can be interleaved with normal native code with zero latency. And then there's the fact that WebGL is so much behind the state of the art that it's not even funny. Sticking to an old version of GL/GLSL severely limits what you can do wit…
>have large enough workloads to justify the latency
Hashsum bruteforcing? It already appears to be picking up, I'm having quite frequent browser crashes these days because of shoddily written JS miners trying to do stuff on GPU