PLEASE never use "You could do most of this stuff in Flash" as an argument against WebAssembly or, uh, any other technology. Flash is a 3rd party, closed source, proprietary plugin. Aspiring to replace it with something slightly better at the very least is worth doing.

All else being equal, would you rather have a .swf binary blob that depends on Adobe, or a WebAssembly binary blob that follows a well defined internet spec and independent implementation by multiple authors?

There are non-Adobe Flash players. The format is well understood. Some commercial video games use Flash for the non-3D GUI. They don't use Adobe's player, but they use Adobe's authoring tools, which are graphics-artist friendly.

[1] http://lightspark.github.io/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnash

Isn't the difference with Flash is that you have a pre-loaded proprietary blob already (the player).

But asm.js (and WebAssembly) runs faster than Flash. See a couple of different benchmarks from 2013 (http://www.j15r.com/blog/2013/04/25/Box2d_Revisited) and from 2014 (http://www.infognition.com/blog/2014/comparing_flash_haxe_da...). asm.js also outperformed Dalvik in 2013: https://blog.mozilla.org/javascript/2013/08/01/staring-at-th...

Here's Unity's recent benchmark of WebGL and asm.js to see how performance has improved and will improve further in future: http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/12/15/updated-webgl-benchmark-...

I'd be interested to see some more recent Flash versus asm.js benchmarks if anyone knows of any.

From the benchmark description: "This version has been stripped of all of the artwork and eye candy we had in the previous version." "This is running content from a local disk, so the time to download files from the network is ignored."

So they ignore all the things the user waits for, and focus on the frame rate that can be achieved once it's loaded. Bearing in mind that the most likely use of this feature is in ads, not twitch games, that's the wrong metric.

Do you have any such download comparisons between Flash, asm.js, and WebAssembly? WebAssembly reduces the download size and speeds up the load time versus asm.js. See Unity's testing:

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/06/18/webgl-webassembly-and-fe...

As for good applications, how about running DOS, MESS and MAME in your browser? It's a nice archive.org feature:

https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games

https://archive.org/details/sega_sms_library

https://archive.org/details/internetarcade

Or video and audio codecs as used by Wikipedia to support those browsers which don't support those codecs natively:

https://github.com/brion/ogv.js/

https://brionv.com/log/2015/08/09/video-decoding-in-the-java...

Also try Bejeweled. A simple game but well executed:

http://bejeweled.popcap.com/html5/0.9.12.9490/html5/Bejewele...