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A comment on Brendan Eich: WebAssembly is a game-changer. Parent comment

Re:Brendan Eich: WebAssembly is a game-changer by smitherfield on Thursday March 10, 2016 @09:30PM (#11264252)
Because it had (and still has) a monopoly on code that runs inside the browser. And it's a pig that's had quite a bit of lipstick put on it. It wouldn't be in widespread use if people had the choice.

That all said, WebAssembly is potentially an avenue to break that monopoly, and I do give him credit for seeking to address the issue.

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Re:Brendan Eich: WebAssembly is a game-changer by mcbutterbunz on Friday March 11, 2016 @02:34AM (#11265227)
People did have a choice: Java Applets, ActiveX, Flash, VBScript. Those all lost.
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Re:Brendan Eich: WebAssembly is a game-changer by smitherfield on Friday March 11, 2016 @07:27AM (#11266171)
Three of those were plugins and the last was proprietary to Internet Explorer only, although I'll admit it was also worse than Javascript. "Javascript: It's better than VBScript!"

And despite being an (awful) plugin with an IDE that cost $600, Flash won in the pre-iPhone/V8 era.

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Re:Brendan Eich: WebAssembly is a game-changer by Touche on Friday March 11, 2016 @08:31AM (#11266459)
> Three of those were plugins and the last was proprietary to Internet Explorer only

They all started from a similar position, JS wasn't a standard from day one, there's a reason why it's emcascript today.

> And despite being an (awful) plugin with an IDE that cost $600, Flash won in the pre-iPhone/V8 era.

That's laughable, what percentage of the web ran on Flash in 2007, 1%?

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Re:Brendan Eich: WebAssembly is a game-changer by smitherfield on Friday March 11, 2016 @09:25AM (#11266761)
>They all started from a similar position, JS wasn't a standard from day one, there's a reason why it's emcascript today.

No, Javascript had the huge advantage of being first; it's the only one on your list that both wasn't a plugin and was supported by IE and Netscape. And yes, modern Javascript is a better technology than any of those, although that's really damning with faint praise.

If Netscape Navigator 2 had shipped with, say, a Perl VM in addition to the Javascript VM, then I can guarantee you that everybody would've written their scripts in Perl instead of Javascript.

>That's laughable, what percentage of the web ran on Flash in 2007, 1%?

Back in the day, the only ways you could write a web app of any complexity/performance were to either use Flash or do it serverside (remember – not long ago! – when the new hot web technology was Ruby on Rails? Remember when it was PHP?). Flash was the only option if you wanted video (well, it or something truly evil like RealPlayer) or if you wanted a consistent and appealing look for your site.

Flash was on 56% of all websites as of 2010: http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2011/04/05/http-archive-url...

Google trends for Flash vs. Javascript in the SF Bay Area: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F02p97%2C%20%2...

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Re:Brendan Eich: WebAssembly is a game-changer by Touche on Friday March 11, 2016 @10:26AM (#11267098)
Flash has long been used to support features not-yet available in the DOM APIs such as copy/paste and video, and of course in ads. There's a huge difference between that and building Flash apps; apps where a flash-displayed interface is the primary way of using the app. Outside of games those were never very popular, JS had overcome it with Google Maps.
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