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A comment on The Planned Obsolescence of Old Coders. Parent comment

Re:The Planned Obsolescence of Old Coders by thaumasiotes on Friday March 08, 2019 @03:46PM (#19342002)
> I think if you pick a concrete example of this phenomena (say, Java applets vs. WebAssembly) and you ask "so why didn't someone take Java Applets and update them, why do we need WebAssembly?", the answers to why this happens start to become more apparent. It's not so much that Java applets were good and then we decided they were unfashionable, as that Java applets were always kind of ugly and we eventually stopped tolerating them.

I've been asking this exact question on various HN threads with WebAssembly announcements, and the answer is always one of "Applets are insecure" or "Java is insecure".

So I don't really follow your example here... whatever security model you want to have, it seems much more obvious to implement it for Java applets than to implement WebAssembly and then implement your preferred security model for WebAssembly. Why do you think we replaced applets with WebAssembly?

(It's kind of a leading question -- my experience as a browser user suggests that we stopped using applets, spent a while not having them, and then started working on WebAssembly. By that analysis, we never replaced applets with WebAssembly -- we replaced applets with nothing, and then replaced nothing with WebAssembly. That would tend to support the more crotchety answer of "people developed WebAssembly because they just forgot about applets".)

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Re:The Planned Obsolescence of Old Coders by le-mark on Friday March 08, 2019 @04:52PM (#19342565)
My understanding was that the concern wasn't necessarily that the jvm was insecure, or the browser was insecure (although they've all had vulberabilities at one time or another) it was the integration between the jvm and the browser that was difficult/impossible to get right. This not only held for Java but any browser plugin (flash, silverlight). The entire concept was just bad.

Now where webassembly comes in is a compilation target for anything to the browser. I had the sorry misfortune of working on a project that had an applet that interacted extensively with the host page. It was excruciating, the api's were not up to the task. At the time, before the canvas tag, that's the length we had to go to get "advanced" functionality into a page. Nowadays that could all be done with js (or X compiled to webassembly) and canvas element. Things evolve.

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Re:The Planned Obsolescence of Old Coders by Const-me on Saturday March 09, 2019 @02:08AM (#19344918)
Native plugins only work on desktops/laptops. They don't work on mobiles because hardware and software diversity, also because security model is more friendly towards consumers. And mobile users are now more than 50%.
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