Everything Else

https://blog.mozilla.org/internetcitize ... et-health/

I'm not a big fan of the idea.
If everything becomes web-based, it will be the end of permanent software licenses. We will be continuously be paying rent to use anything proprietary.

However, I see potential that this will give more impulse to the development and adoption of end user open source general use applications.

What do you think?

It is a disease - this is so bloated. The browser as an OS.

Yeay - lets heat the atmosphere with Ryzen and Core i7.

It's tempting for me to think "well, if it means the end of everybody including a hundred megabytes of Javascript on every site..." But we all know that won't happen, and this'll only make things worse. And yes, browser-as-OS can go die in a fire.

Shiunbird wrote: However, I see potential that this will give more impulse to the development and adoption of end user open source general use applications.

Let me complete this: because many people I guess will run away from this. Unless mankind is lazier than I think...

I don't really see it as different from PNaCl and asm.js, and about as likely to get traction on a large scale (i.e., not). Trying to compile to asm.js as a target is ridiculous even with Emscripten, and wasm isn't intrinsically going to do any better. In addition, just like asm.js, the parsing (even if binary) and validation steps alone are JIT, not AOT, and require lots of memory and compute time. These runtimes won't take off until efficient crossbuilding and deployment tools catch up, and they won't catch up until the runtimes take off and make it meaningful for compiler and build system authors to think about them.

Also, am I correct in gathering that this is a Firefox-specific extension and not a browser-independent standard? That's definitely going to make everything better forever.

No, wasm has support from all the major engines; I think it's just that Firefox is the only one to have it exposed and shipping.
http://webassembly.org/roadmap/

Shiunbird wrote: We will be continuously be paying rent to use anything proprietary.

After the frontier is settled, the usurious rent seekers always arrive to "invest" in the hot property. Color me cynical but the laziness of humanity cannot be underestimated. Even in my children's classes most do not have home computers, they have phones. Think about that for a second, the disconnected phone poster as new model consumer. No longer a part of any digital community, just a predatory shitposter extracting entertainment from the bosom of dying sub-culture while paying rents to those terminally uncreative types.

I have hope for a post-collapse world though.