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WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

joeyh.name

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Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#3

Post by Max-q »

The issue I first think about if HTML goes away and the web is WASM blobs instead is text. Accessibility, rendering, all the different languages. The amount of code in the browsers making HTML accessible and working in all languages is enormous. If we are going in that direction, we at least need a standard library handling this, so that we don’t take a big step back to the times of Flash.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#5

Post by spankalee »

This post is so wrong and right at the same time.

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.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#8

Post by skerit »

Funny to read this:

> So there are only 2 web browser engines, and it seems likely there will soon only be 1, 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

Ladybird seems to be thriving. Sure, they themselves only plan on releasing a beta version next year, but still.

And it's even on the Hacker News frontpage right now! https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#9

Post by jillesvangurp »

> So there are only 2 web browser engines, and it seems likely there will soon only be 1, 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. Maybe eventually someone will succeed and there will be 2 again. Best case. What a situation.

The premise of this article seems completely wrong.

Chromium, Safari, Firefox. And a longtail of half implemented alternatives. But the point is that there are 3 independent browser engines that are fairly widely used. They also have their own indepenedent javascript and WASM implementations. There are a few non browser based WASM implementations in addition to that. As standards go, that's a pretty widely implemented one. There are some people working stubbornly on completely new browser engines even. The standards are in better shape they've ever been since the inception on the web. HTML 5 is way better defined than most of its predecessors.

If everybody was like this, we'd all be using Internet Explorer. Firefox would never have gained any traction. Chrome would have flopped and Google would have killed it. Apple would have given up on Safari. None of those things happened. Because we are not all passively whining on the sidelines about how things used to be better while not lifting a finger to do anything about it.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#10

Post by aredox »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #9

> So there are only 2 web browser engines, and it seems likely there will soon only be 1, 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. Maybe eventually someone will succeed and there will be 2 again. Best case. What a situation. The premise of this article seems completely wrong. Chromium, S…

Look at the market share. And look at how much breakage report there is with Firefox vs. Chrome or Safari (not to say the return of "this website works better with Chrome" disclaimers, as if we were back to IE6).
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