Back to the days of Flash / Silverlight websites?

A browser is nice because the provider can continue to use their whole tech stack, hosting, dev tools, etc. Just wrap it in a proxy that only wants to talk to the "inner browser".

That you can do trivially even today. Just show your web site using in-browser VNC client.

That's the final form. Kinda like video game streaming.

Taking power away from the user seems to be a large part of the appeal of WASM. Wasn't it just a year or two ago that it was being reported that 75% of WASM modules are malicious? A a study from previous years had said 50% of all websites using it were malicious so the trend line isn't looking great.

I don't know how we got from "don't download and install random software from untrusted sources on your devices" to "let anyone with a website run code directly on your hardware. Sandboxes are impossible to breach!"

I get that it's cool tech and the promise of writing software to run on many different platforms is exciting, but from a real world/user perspective it's insane.

> I don't know how we got from "don't download and install random software from untrusted sources on your devices" to "let anyone with a website run code directly on your hardware. Sandboxes are impossible to breech!"

The whole point of WASM is that it's the alternative to downloading and installing random software.

Wasn’t that your parents point though?

"Same malware, but with fewer steps" isn't exactly a win for WASM.

It has exactly the same potential in the control and code-running respects as (minified) JavaScript. It’s overrepresented in malware because it’s faster, i.e. better for cryptominers. (Many sandbox breaches come from JavaScript’s complexity.)

Right, did everyone forget about ASM.js? We already had conpile-to-js, it was just a horrible subset of more efficient JS. WASM is just the extension and further development of that.

I’d argue that “JS as a compilation target” already did everything WASM could do.

It hasn’t been the end of the world, but it hasn’t been great either.