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How exactly did Mozilla win this fight? WebAssembly was inspired by Mozilla's asm.js and Google's PNaCl. Also, the team working on WebAssembly are from Mozilla,

How exactly did Mozilla win this fight? WebAssembly was inspired by Mozilla's asm.js and Google's PNaCl. Also, the team working on WebAssembly are from Mozilla, Microsoft, Google and Apple. The real winner here are users because we now have a standard among all major browsers.

withjive 9y ago
What you said is true, however... I am referring to the initial offering of Native Client for inclusion into FireFox. Since this did not happen, Native client did not see the uptake it needed— and the team was destaffed. Since it was a working platform that actually existed and let you use a modified version of LLVM, it was quite usable. We could of have powerful native sandboxed apps quite a long time ago if FireFox became PNaCl compatible. Instead, Mozilla envisioned that the JIT could eventually bridge the native performance gap. Mozilla defended this ideas such as ASM and emscripten. And now Mozilla is coming close to a more open and performant web.
roca 9y ago
Google developed NaCl and PNaCl and put the latter out on the Web with no spec --- just "pull this version of LLVM and ship it". Also, apps written in PNaCl used the Pepper API for all platform features, a giant pile of Chromium code also with no spec. All an absolute nightmare for anyone who cares about Web standards and browser bloat. These efforts required big Google teams working for many years ... efforts which are now going by the wayside. Mozilla put together a small team and did asm.js to show that you could port C/C++ apps to the Web and get good performance while reusing the JS engine and all the existing Web platform APIs. Now we have WebAssembly, which uses existing Web platform APIs and which browser vendors are implementing by reusing the guts of their JS engines. It's obvious who won. In a way it doesn't matter "who won" because as you say Web developers are the ultimate winners. But it does underscore how much the Web continues to owe to Mozilla. (It's also an illustration of how powerful companies can commit massive blunders and get away scot-free in the marketplace and in PR.)
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  There's no blunder: Google had a goal, threw out something, stimulated competition over the precise implementation, and now there is a universally (among browser vendors) accepted solution moving the web in the direction Google wanted. That's a strategic victory for Google.
  - roca 9y ago
    Google wasted huge resources on an approach which it was obvious from the beginning would never lead to a Web standard. Mozilla people, including me, told Google people even before PNaCl appeared that introducing the whole new non-standard Pepper API was unacceptable.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      > Google wasted huge resources on an approach which it was obvious from the beginning would never lead to a Web standard. But it did lead to a web standard, even if it didn't become one. And in the interim, it provided utility to Google. > Mozilla people, including me, told Google people even before PNaCl appeared that introducing the whole new non-standard Pepper API was unacceptable. Yeah, you've mentioned that quite a few times. So what? Unacceptable nonstandard moves are a big part of what stimulates standards progress.
      - roca 9y ago
        If spending any amount of resources to get any amount of utility counts as success, then there is no such thing as failure.
        IamCarbonMan 9y ago
        This arguably applies to a great many Google products and services. Google has enough resources to fling around that success and failure start to blur.
        will4274 9y ago

withjive 9y ago

What you said is true, however... I am referring to the initial offering of Native Client for inclusion into FireFox. Since this did not happen, Native client did not see the uptake it needed— and the team was destaffed. Since it was a working platform that actually existed and let you use a modified version of LLVM, it was quite usable. We could of have powerful native sandboxed apps quite a long time ago if FireFox became PNaCl compatible. Instead, Mozilla envisioned that the JIT could eventually bridge the native performance gap. Mozilla defended this ideas such as ASM and emscripten. And now Mozilla is coming close to a more open and performant web.

roca 9y ago

Google developed NaCl and PNaCl and put the latter out on the Web with no spec --- just "pull this version of LLVM and ship it". Also, apps written in PNaCl used the Pepper API for all platform features, a giant pile of Chromium code also with no spec. All an absolute nightmare for anyone who cares about Web standards and browser bloat. These efforts required big Google teams working for many years ... efforts which are now going by the wayside. Mozilla put together a small team and did asm.js to show that you could port C/C++ apps to the Web and get good performance while reusing the JS engine and all the existing Web platform APIs. Now we have WebAssembly, which uses existing Web platform APIs and which browser vendors are implementing by reusing the guts of their JS engines. It's obvious who won. In a way it doesn't matter "who won" because as you say Web developers are the ultimate winners. But it does underscore how much the Web continues to owe to Mozilla. (It's also an illustration of how powerful companies can commit massive blunders and get away scot-free in the marketplace and in PR.)

dragonwriter 9y ago
There's no blunder: Google had a goal, threw out something, stimulated competition over the precise implementation, and now there is a universally (among browser vendors) accepted solution moving the web in the direction Google wanted. That's a strategic victory for Google.
- roca 9y ago
  Google wasted huge resources on an approach which it was obvious from the beginning would never lead to a Web standard. Mozilla people, including me, told Google people even before PNaCl appeared that introducing the whole new non-standard Pepper API was unacceptable.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Google wasted huge resources on an approach which it was obvious from the beginning would never lead to a Web standard. But it did lead to a web standard, even if it didn't become one. And in the interim, it provided utility to Google. > Mozilla people, including me, told Google people even before PNaCl appeared that introducing the whole new non-standard Pepper API was unacceptable. Yeah, you've mentioned that quite a few times. So what? Unacceptable nonstandard moves are a big part of what stimulates standards progress.
    - roca 9y ago
      If spending any amount of resources to get any amount of utility counts as success, then there is no such thing as failure.
      - IamCarbonMan 9y ago
        This arguably applies to a great many Google products and services. Google has enough resources to fling around that success and failure start to blur.
      - will4274 9y ago