Portable Native Client is a really huge project that takes a lot of PhD-level talent to implement correctly, and it requires a very specific type of organizatio

Portable Native Client is a really huge project that takes a lot of PhD-level talent to implement correctly, and it requires a very specific type of organization that has the requisite "will" and "way" to make it happen. Even if Mozilla had the will, they really don't have any way to contribute very significantly to the development effort, because it sort of requires a lot of very talented people getting paid large sums of money for long periods of time... which is obviously something that Google can afford to do. I think everyone has always known that NPAPI was eventually going to have to be completely overhauled or even replaced. For anyone to constantly harp on the idea that "all that matters is the open web" when they come from the very same organization -- although going by a different name -- for which the original binary plugin architecture was named (Netscape Plugin API) is just patently absurd. There is so much quality, freely available C/C++ code in this world that it is pretty mind boggling, and the purely technical achievement of allowing this code to be efficiently used by end users through the web platform is, again, a fairly mind boggling idea. I'm not saying that this web assembly concept won't have any use cases whatsoever in the future, but I am saying that the proven PNaCl technology that exists right now is way, way too powerful for any web-based applications developer worth his or her soul to pass up very easily.