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WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

joeyh.name

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Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#171

Post by zfg »

pjmlp wrote: post #168
zfg wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wrong, Flash was in the process of doing exactly that. Except it didn't succeed at it. And Flash is long dead now. WebAssembly is here today and supports more languages than Flash ever did.

Because of Steve Jobs, followed by Chrome NaCL, superseded by PNaCL, that Mozzilla refused to adopt pushing asmjs instead, and having everyone to agree with WebAssembly, still a shadow of Flash developer tooling experience today. And for what, now that Firefox is mostly irrelevant and is Google for all practical purposes calling the shots on the Web and related standards. Don't mistake technical capabilities with pol…

> Because of Steve Jobs

If one man, on a whim, could destroy Flash then Flash deserved to die.

> And for what

For a royalty free platform that everyone is free to implement. No one wanted to be beholden to a proprietary platform they'd have to license from Adobe.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#173

Post by johnecheck »

wat10000 wrote: post #162
Rohansi wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 2025 and most apps do not match the OS they run on. What would you even want apps to match on Windows? There are different styles depending on what you build with (Win32/Forms, WPF, UWP, etc).

I'm painfully aware. Modern apps are mostly terrible. I don't know or care what apps would match on Windows. I don't use Windows. On the systems I do use, I want apps to look like they fit in.

I've never understood this "every program on my device should look like the same company designed it" mentality.

Nothing against using the pre-built ui components provided by the OS, but looking down on a developer that decides to use something else? Just weird to me. A checkbox is a checkbox, it really doesn't matter whether App A's checkboxes look identical to App B.

Now, if App A's checkboxes look different than App A's other checkboxes, then I'll complain.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#174

Post by pmontra »

bartread wrote: post #69
codedokode wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You put the blame on Google but isn't it your fault, people who get excited every time a new feature gets added to web standards, and developers who use it? Like CSS masonry, or WebRTC, or web components with shadow DOM? Features like this get lot of upvotes here.

This is the truth of it: if people chose Firefox, or another alternative, over Chrome then Google would have less power to impose its will on the web. This would be a good thing. Google’s power on the web doesn’t simply come from having lots of money and resources - see, as examples, any of the multitude of Google’s failures and shuttered products - but mostly comes from its reach . “Everybody” uses Chrome. If that w…

I never used Chrome much. I think I jumped from IE5 to Firefox. IE6 only for testing web apps.

Frankly nearly everything has been working well in Firefox for a long time. The only two sources of problems are:

1) Long tail experimental sites that use or want to demonstrate some new technology. I find most of them on the home page of HN.

2) Myself and the security/privacy plugins I use. They break some web pages, especially ecommerce and payment workflows. I either go hunting for the correct combination of permissions in uMatrix (I would become crazy soon if I used uBlock Origin for that) or I use that very site in Chrome and the close it. Major ecommerce sites don't have any problem. The long tail ones are weirder in their choice of third parties. However that's an issue that any browser would have, it's not because of Firefox.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#175

Post by pjmlp »

zfg wrote: post #171
pjmlp wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of Steve Jobs, followed by Chrome NaCL, superseded by PNaCL, that Mozzilla refused to adopt pushing asmjs instead, and having everyone to agree with WebAssembly, still a shadow of Flash developer tooling experience today. And for what, now that Firefox is mostly irrelevant and is Google for all practical purposes calling the shots on the Web and related standards. Don't mistake technical capabilities with pol…

> Because of Steve Jobs If one man, on a whim, could destroy Flash then Flash deserved to die. > And for what For a royalty free platform that everyone is free to implement. No one wanted to be beholden to a proprietary platform they'd have to license from Adobe.

That man closed the Apple ecosystem doors on Flash, naturally he was not alone, he had an horde of followers.

It remains to be seen how much royalty free Chrome remains, Web is now ChromeOS, with exception of a little Gaulish village called iOS.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#176

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

johnecheck wrote: post #173
wat10000 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm painfully aware. Modern apps are mostly terrible. I don't know or care what apps would match on Windows. I don't use Windows. On the systems I do use, I want apps to look like they fit in.

I've never understood this "every program on my device should look like the same company designed it" mentality. Nothing against using the pre-built ui components provided by the OS, but looking down on a developer that decides to use something else? Just weird to me. A checkbox is a checkbox, it really doesn't matter whether App A's checkboxes look identical to App B. Now, if App A's checkboxes look different than A…

It's mental overhead; if App A's checkboxs look different than the ones in App B, then I have to switch that mental context every time I switch windows. If everything uses the same controls, then that consistency means users don't have to think about the controls.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#177

Post by pepsi-not-coke »

immibis wrote: post #85
pepsi-not-coke wrote: post #60

I proposed a similar idea (before WASM was a thing) in 2015 on the W3 TAG mailing list, where I simply said why can't the site owners tell the user's browser what browser engine, including specialized ones, should be loaded to render and interact with their site/app. It was dismissed with idiots from the browser vendors saying it's impossible because of ABI compatibility etc. I kid you not, 10 years ago, and then som…

The Content-Type header tells your Firefox 3 browser whether to use the HTML rendering engine, the XHTML rendering engine, the XUL rendering engine, or the Adobe Flash rendering engine. Is that what you mean?

No, that does not solve the problem of the Google monopoly. Not a fixed set contained within one browser engine, but the browser engine itself, like Webkit vs some other engine vs some specialized engines. If your engine-host browser does not have a give engine or specific version of an engine it downloads it and caches it. WASM/Wayland makes the idea feasible, loading lightweight WASM modules.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#178

Post by zfg »

pjmlp wrote: post #175
zfg wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because of Steve Jobs If one man, on a whim, could destroy Flash then Flash deserved to die. > And for what For a royalty free platform that everyone is free to implement. No one wanted to be beholden to a proprietary platform they'd have to license from Adobe.

That man closed the Apple ecosystem doors on Flash, naturally he was not alone, he had an horde of followers. It remains to be seen how much royalty free Chrome remains, Web is now ChromeOS, with exception of a little Gaulish village called iOS.

> That man closed the Apple ecosystem doors on Flash

Which is exactly the point, isn't it. Adobe's business model around Flash was so fragile that he could do it.

He couldn't do it to the web.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#180

Post by c-hendricks »

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #152
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WHich was... only windows computers since Flash barely worked on Macs or Linux, and never properly made it to mobile, where it was also a complete battery drain when it did in fact do things... sometimes.

I have different memories from before 2012. Flex apps I built were used on all 3 and worked flawlessly in AIR. Looked and behaved exactly the same everywhere. Indeed, though, barely made to mobile. But Nokia N95 was pretty cool.

What was the process of installing AIR like on Linux?
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