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We have been doing this for -decades- with Shockwave, Java applets, and Active X controls.
by teej 11y ago
We have been doing this for -decades- with Shockwave, Java applets, and Active X controls.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- CaptSpify 11y agoBut they always end up abused. Everyone hates all of those, and that's good, because it causes people to steer away from them. Instead of throwing our hands up, and giving up, we should continue to try to keep those out.
- bobajeff 11y agoThe main thing I didn't like about those was that they were proprietary single vendor blobs that stagnated and ran poorly.
- CaptSpify 11y agoI guess I fail to see how the end result of this will end up any different
- bobajeff 11y agoConsidering WebAssembly is a feature that going to be standardised and supported in all JavaScript engines while those other things were either proprietary runtimes or browser specific API's I'd say you have no reason to think this will end up like them.
- CaptSpify 11y agoso, IMO, I don't think any of them failed because they were > standardised and supported in all JavaScript engines while those other things were either proprietary runtimes or browser specific API's I think they failed because they were closed off, and nobody could read the shitty code, so people wrote shitty code. If we have things open, it gives people an incentive to make it look/work nice. Sure, not everyone will, but it makes it easier to shame those that dont.
- bobajeff 11y agoYou can't read the code of most C++ programs yet if operating systems dropped support for C++ there would be a reckoning.
- drdaeman 11y agoWell, it's no different. Say, ActiveX were just x86 binary blobs. Java applets were JVM binary blobs. (Flash applets were somewhat worser kind of binary blobs with proprietary and undocumented bytecode.) WebAssembly is... again, binary blobs.
- bobajeff 11y agoThe runtime (which I was taking about) isn't a blob. Plus minified and obsfucated JavaScript is already quite common. See closure and asm.js.
- drdaeman 11y agoWell, my point is OpenJDK/IcedTea-Web isn't a blob either, but it doesn't make Java applets any better. Neither is Wine (which can host ActiveX controls), but I'm not going to try it at home. And I agree that modern minified, packed and obfuscated JavaScript is also more like a binary blob than source code. WebAssembly is just a logical conclusion of this.
- Animats 11y agoHow long before the first WebAssembly exploit? (And what advantage does WebAssembly have over Java applets? We've been down this road.)
- icedchai 11y agoThe advantage? Instead of having access to a large, stable ecosystem with 20+ years of engineering behind it (Java/JVM), you'll get to use fun, new half-baked tools that barely work to build your webassembly apps. In another 20 years time, we might be at the level of productivity we had 20 years ago with VisualBasic.
- oblio 11y agoThe advantage is that in time people agree about web standards. Good luck getting Visual Basic adopted as an standard ;)
- vmorgulis 11y agoImagine you can run (efficiently) Eclipse or Lucene in any browser. Someone try to do that with WebKit: http://trevorlinton.github.io/ http://trevorlinton.github.io/
- jestar_jokin 11y agoEclipse (Che) is already coming to the browser! https://eclipse.org/che/ https://eclipse.org/che/
- rtpg 11y agoDo people outside of "The Web is for documents only!" camp really hate Flash? I've had many good web experiences thanks to Flash (granted, mostly movies and games, but still...) People on HN seem to discount how absolutely amazing it is to have a VM that can almost seamlessly connect to a network and pull down awesome programs!
- dietrichepp 11y agoI'm a big fan of Web Assembly but I've hated Flash for a long time. Flash apps tended to peg the CPU and shorten battery life on my laptop, even though most were inconsequential to the web pages that used them (ads). Constant security holes left me paranoid. Crashes left me frustrated. I can't count how many times that Flash crashed on me. The UI of most Flash apps left many things to be desired. From a technical perspective, it was also a deeply flawed design with a mediocre implementation from one vendor. Most video sites which use Flash seem to be far inferior to their HTML+JavaScript counterparts, only the biggest sites ever had decent flash players (Vimeo, YouTube), and I've noticed that some Flash video players can't really handle full screen video with the performance that they should. Ugh. I was glad so many years ago when Flash stopped being bundled with the OS, so I didn't need to take any extra steps to avoid it.
- reitanqild 11y agoI find myself kind of pragmatic but I hated Flash because once it was available people used it for everything, even stuff that never needed it in the first place.
- stray 11y agoFlash is great -- I love being forced to update flash every 20 minutes.
- CaptSpify 11y agoFlash does provide a lot of nice/cool things. The problem is it was abused because it was "cool". If we could get people to use it only when necessary, then I probably would have been OK with it. Too many people end up using this in inappropriate places.
- lmm 11y agoNo, we hated them because their performance and UX was bad. Running programs off the Internet, safely, has long been the goal.
- CaptSpify 11y agoI guess I fail to see how this will be any safer?
- niutech 11y agoBut this time we do it fully open source, working everywhere unlike ActiveX, and much faster than Java applets.