14 ms·

Ever since WebAssembly was first introduced, I thought it was obvious[1][2] that the end game for those that want to control the web is sending opaque binary bl

by pdkl95 5y ago

Ever since WebAssembly was first introduced, I thought it was obvious[1][2] that the end game for those that want to control the web is sending opaque binary blobs of code that only use the browser for the canvas tag's framebuffer. Font rendering and layout can all easily be accomplished by embedding libraries like freetype. This breaks all forms of user control - like ad blockers - and turns the web back into cable TV. I didn't expect the first move towards canvas-only rendering to be traditional wordprocessors. As usual, this is merely the first step. Once the tech has been normalized by developers, transitioning regular webpages will be a fait accompli. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10294187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10294187 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26351771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26351771

sgt 5y ago
It's a bad thing in terms of openness but a good thing in terms of performance and making web applications more like real desktop applications. A lot of DOM work is a nightmare, so I sort of welcome to the Canvas based approach.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  DOM is just HTML/CSS. It's not a 'nightmare', it's actually a pretty good fit for the semantics of most UI's.
  - kaliszad 5y ago
    Yes, DOM is "just" HTML and CSS with a JS API. All of that is quite broken in various places, the APIs usually rather bad, mutability everywhere and performance suffers as soon as you e.g. switch the cursor from an arrow to hand/ finger, there can be a complete re-render. Google especially is in a position to fix most of these things if they wanted to. They even have the best test-data of any company. But they choose to side-step some of these problems by introducing another, completely new technology and then a small team of people goes on to hack something useable using this technology as if they were a small startup. The problem is, Google is basically a collection of teams with very different focus points. Some are paid to develop new technology no matter if they want it for a specific product. Other people are paid to "improve" an existing product, e.g. Google Docs and have to use what is available. Any kind of exchange of information between teams is a friction and blocks things from being improved. At OrgPad, 10% of CPU time is the maximum we can use if we want a smooth experience. The rest is eaten by the browser and inefficiencies there. I don't think we are alone in stepping over bugs, idiotic APIs and implementation differences everywhere all the time. The fix is not to delegate most of the work to the web developer but for the browser and web standards people to step up and do a thorough job with existing stuff.
    - hnedeotes 5y ago
      I'm one of those persons that really want browsers to be viable options to building fully fledged applications but I sincerely like the core concepts of HTML and CSS. I think the biggest issue is that things kept on being tacked on the primitive specification to solve ever evolving needs. The browsers themselves are written in languages that are meant to go fast - which is important for drawing of elements, rebuilding trees, etc - but not good for doing concerted async operations in a structured fashion. Just looking at those codebases makes you want to stab your eyes with a fork up to your brain. In my, very valuable, opinion, a re-assessment of what HTML is (ignoring the name, and treating it as the language of the browser instead of hyper text) and what at web page can be - along with a browser designed to be multi-tabbed, async by nature, supporting advanced non-tree based layouts (maybe still trees, but trees that could be part of zindexed layers? detached layers that allowed for interaction handlers separate from the visual elements?) in a language that has tools to model those behaviours, could probably re-use all the lessons from HTML, CSS and JS apps. Of course, it would still be like building everything again - but I'm not sure wasm/canvas blobs is a better solution long-term.
  - simiones 5y ago
    If you've ever used a real UI framework, HTML/CSS is absolutely a nightmare. It is missing almost entirely in any kind of useful controls, which is why there are so many myriads of control libraries. Edit: however, replacing HTML+CSS with a canvas is absolutely a step in the wrong direction. I'm advocating for a richer Web, not a stream of pixels controlled by Google.
    - gentleman11 5y ago
      Care to elaborate what “real ui frameworks” do better? What frameworks do you have in mind when you say that?
      - simiones 5y ago
        Sure! I'm thinking of things like QT, WPF, WinForms, Java Swing. What these have in common that is missing from HTML/CSS/DOM is a significant library of controls and layouts.
- tengbretson 5y ago
  We're just one more concession away from getting the performance we had 20 years ago with native applications. Edit: The path we're on just seems so obvious I kind of just want to skip ahead and get it over with. - Developers and content publishers love the ergonomics and control of just shipping WASM binaries that paint to a canvas and it becomes the de facto standard. - After 2-3 years of everyone's computer being used to surreptitiously mine crypto everywhere they go we re-learn the lessons of Java applets. - In comes browsers that require signed WASM binaries for your protection. The world is an app store. Curtains.
  - goalieca 5y ago
    Careful here, these are more like thin clients with high network latencies.
    - EvanAnderson 5y ago
      There's local processing and peripherals. I think you're looking for the term "smart terminals". Something like these for the "modern era": https://www.curiousmarc.com/computing/hp-264x-terminals https://www.curiousmarc.com/computing/hp-264x-terminals
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    Browsers still support arcane HMTL features from decades ago (and thus can display most web sites from decades ago). Other than things that were already decidedly not part of web standards (like Flash), I’m aware of very little if any backwards-incompatible changes made by popular browsers. So I'm having trouble seeing this slippery slope you’re describing.
  - sgt 5y ago
    Funny. And then at some point someone will rediscover native apps.
- OscarTheGrinch 5y ago
  I, for one, welcome our new canvas based overlords.
- dukeofdoom 5y ago
  Couldn't agree more. Developer Lives Matter. Lifetimes have been lost to simple things like trying to get a modal popup to work.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    Isn't that what <dialog> is for? That's just HTML plus minimal JS.
    - dukeofdoom 5y ago
      No, I wasn't talking about that. Before getting censored. I meant a dialog with a form on it.
  - pleasedonot 5y ago
    Please don't riff on the Black Lives Matter movement with things that are more trivial than civil rights. I doubt your intentions were to delegitimize the movement, but still.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  > making web applications more like real desktop applications. Web developers are the only people who actually want this. Its not something that would benefit society / users.
  - gentleman11 5y ago
    “As a user, I want my apps developers to have a good experience” - a scrum task
- switch007 5y ago
  > but a good thing in terms of performance Performance is a poison chalice. Many, many people were won over by Chrome's blistering speed. Now they won't have proper ad blocking.
  - Sunspark 5y ago
    I offer Firefox as the solution.
    - switch007 5y ago
      Absolutely, Quantum was a big leap. But many people are devoted to chrome and so are developers. Many sites are still worse on Firefox than Chrome.
      - Sunspark 5y ago
        Ah, but this is in the eye of the beholder. For example, Firefox has an option to allow one to deselect the option "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above". I usually browse the web in aliased legible Verdana as a result. It also allows you to choose the colours of the background, links, etc. Chromium browsers do not allow you this choice. There, the philosophy seems to be that the web is a designer-driven layout medium and that the viewer should not have accessibility choices. Btw, some of the "sites worse", if you're referring to Google, that's them just breaking things intentionally. You can sometimes work around it by specifying a different useragent and then things are fast again until they change things again. As a browser, Firefox is standards compliant. I agree there are many applications that use a web interface as the GUI and a bunch were coded for IE6 or IE6 with ActiveX and don't display well (or at all) in Chrome. It really depends, but the problem isn't that Firefox follows standards, but that the developers did not follow standards.
- nine_k 5y ago
  > making web applications more like real desktop applications You mean, abandoning web applications and migrating to network-delivered desktop applications? Because nothing 'web' remains about them: no HTML, no links, no open standards.
EvanAnderson 5y ago
I am in complete agreement. When I've brought this up on HN in the past it's always been dismissed with "But accessibility!". A big company like Google can handle that just fine. Presumably they'll eventually port Chrome to WASM. Then they can completely control the browsing experience. To exert any control over our browsing experience we'll be single-stepping thru machine code. I had fun cracking Apple II and PC software back in the late 80s and early 90s but I'm not necessarily looking forward to doing that again.
- spijdar 5y ago
  > Presumably they'll eventually port Chrome to WASM. Then they can completely control the browsing experience. ...what? As opposed to shipping binary executables for an OS/arch combo, they'll ship a binary executable for WASM, and then a second binary executable for the OS? If they want to take Chrome closed source and make it fully obfuscated, they can do that already, with or without WASM. Chrome is already closed-source, only Chromium is open -- and we know Chrome has secret sauce in it not from the repos.
  - EvanAnderson 5y ago
    I didn't express that very eloquently. I expect there will be a WASM-based browser embedded within some (most?) websites, eventually. The public-facing webserver will serve-up the WASM-based "inner browser" and nothing else. Content will only be accessible via the "inner browser". Determined attackers will be able to extract the keys used by the "inner browser", for sure, but the average person won't be able to. It'll be packaged as a product, probably targeted at "traditional media" sites: Use this on your website and nobody can block your ads or bypass your paywall. You can use all your existing development tools, servers, etc, and it'll "Just Work".
    - blt 5y ago
      Wow, this is plausible and disgusting.
  - jorvi 5y ago
est31 5y ago
Ad blockers could still "scroll" through a website, run an AI model on it to discover the ad sections, and cut them out. Even a simple model that filters out visual animations and replaces them with a static would be useful as a large annoying component of online ads is the movement and blinking etc. that make it hard to focus on the content. Dark mode etc can, too, be implemented to work in terms of framebuffers only. But yes, unless there is a serious need, canvas rendering is a severe regression.
- anon_tor_12345 5y ago
  >run an AI model what exactly would this AI model be trained on?
  - iandanforth 5y ago
    Ads? The suggested approach is "from pixels" so any rendered ad is a source of training pixels.
- tjpnz 5y ago
  I've seen some rather atrocious techniques employed to bake ads into source but that can still be done without any performance impact. Making that work in WASM would require dynamic recompilation, doable perhaps for smaller apps but for behemoths like Gmail and Docs I couldn't see even Google getting that to scale. I think we'll still have browsers performing additional HTTP requests for that stuff, at least in the short to medium term. So traditional adblocking techniques will still be viable.
- asciimov 5y ago
  It will be like cutting out the ads in a newspaper. Lots of holes, everywhere.
  - exhilaration 5y ago
    The difference from a physical newspaper is that on a computer we don't have to leave holes, we can replace them with beautiful artwork or our favorite cat pictures. That's still a hell of a lot better than ads.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
shadowgovt 5y ago
Is ad blocking Google Docs really a concern though?
- Miraste 5y ago
  No, but how much longer do you think it will take them to bring this to Google and YouTube and AdWords?
  - yhoneycomb 5y ago
    Honestly if they did that I think I’d strongly consider paid alternatives to YouTube. Most of the channels I like are on curiosity stream/nebula. I’ve never subscribed because I don’t feel like I have a reason to. But that would definitely give me a reason.
    - google234123 5y ago
      Or you could just pay for Youtube which removed ads.
      - yhoneycomb 5y ago
        I’d rather not support a monopoly
- slater 5y ago
  i think the worry is more about the next steps, not google docs per se
rektide 5y ago
Treating the web browser like a VNC terminal, a way to push pixels, is just a vile degredation of the web. The web is not applications. People view the web via a user-agent, a tool that let's them navigate & view hypertext as they want. Breaking away from hypertext, pushing images in people's faces: it's not the web. It's an assault, a great step backwards. It's an attack on the internet. Absolutely people are definitely starting to treat the web as a big canvas. Those people are doing great injustice & cruelty to one of the only pro-user pro-agency information technologies ever created.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  > The web is not applications Unfortunately, all the people who work on the web disagree. They need what could be a simple, text based site into a full blown "application" to justify their own job.
  - rektide 5y ago
    The web can do programmatic, interactive systems very well. In my opinion, it does it much much better than applications. And it should be doing it. (Alas, a huge huge huge amount of web applications don't espouse the virtues of the web, don't use url based routing, don't have good service worker caching, & countless other horrific faults. I continue to see that as not the web's fault but I think there's a lot of room for opinions on this, at least.) But interactive web systems shouldn't regress to the hostile, anti-user, anti-extensibility stance of an application. It should continue to offer the upsides of being the web.
iandanforth 5y ago
And all the problems solved by HTML and CSS will be new again, there will be many new incompatible frameworks for handling layout and styling, a blinking cursor will again take 200x the CPU it should to implement. Ugh.
- RhodesianHunter 5y ago
  I for one would welcome the death of HTML and CSS. Unfortunately I suspect they will merely be re-used for this.
  - falcolas 5y ago
    HTML and CSS are fantastic; when used what they were designed for. Document markup and display. I blame webapp developers for the scope creep and subsequent denigration of a perfectly reasonable set of standards.
    - j-krieger 5y ago
      HTML and CSS were never denigrated. There's not one superficial feature which doesn't make sense. Most of it is barebones. If I had to pick one feature the blows the scope out of proportion, it would be the `is` selector, but that's the only one I can think of
      - falcolas 5y ago
        Denigrated ~= put down. And there's plenty of examples within the comments of this article where people - webapp developers - harp on how bad HTML and CSS are, because HTML and CSS weren't designed for webapps.
        madeofpalk 5y ago
        CSS is the worst layout language, except for all the others.
    - hueti 5y ago
sambroner 5y ago
Is this canvas actually rendered with WASM? I don't see WASM in dev tools on their sample doc. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N1XaAI4ZlCUHNWJBXJUBFjxSTlsD5XctCz6LB3Calcg/preview#heading=h.rrar1dgps27e https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N1XaAI4ZlCUHNWJBXJUBFjxS...
- brabel 5y ago
  You're right, there seems to be only JS code running in this example... and it performs very well for me, actually. Everything people were complaining about seems to work just fine, including text selection and Ctrl+F!
ballenf 5y ago
WASM plus encryption will mean it could be illegal to decrypt/alter website code just like a Netflix video stream. Adblock criminalization is close.
- nine_k 5y ago
  Adblock / pihole technical impossibility, too.
  - entropicdrifter 5y ago
    Maybe they could bypass it in Chrome, but it wouldn't make it impossible to use for anyone smart enough to set up a pihole.
    - EvanAnderson 5y ago
      The WASM code will eventually implement its own DNS analog (or use DoH with a pinned certificate). It'll all be completely opaque TLS to your Pi Hole. Your Pi Hole is the same thing, functionally, as the tools a nation state hostile to human rights uses to filter the Internet. You'll get the same treatment that they do.
      - withinboredom 5y ago
        That’s when you install squid and have it do the terminating TLS. They won’t pin the certs, too many corps do this already and not to mention certificate lifetime is in the realm of leaving a browser open for weeks.
        deeter72 5y ago
        Deploying squid is not simple as deploying a PiHole.
    - shawnz 5y ago
      DNS blocking is way more trivial to bypass than client-side blocking.
dahfizz 5y ago
Yet another reason to use Pi-hole. The web browser is the wrong place to try and fight against this sort of thing. Secure your home network once instead of fighting an arms race on each device you have.
- kaba0 5y ago
  How does it help here? They can trivially include ads server-side, pi-hole would see nothing at all.
  - guntars 5y ago
    You can do it, but it’s not done commonly. The most common way ads get onto the page is by including a third party script which is easily blocked.
    - irrational 5y ago
      Today, but this entire discussion is about how things will work tomorrow.
  - dahfizz 5y ago
    It would be easy to implement server-side rendering, but it carries significant cost in processing time and networking. If they can block all adblocking browser extensions by abusing WASM, the cost of server-side rendering will outweigh the 0.0001% of people that have a pihole set up.
- duxup 5y ago
  Can you target "opaque binary blobs of code" with a pie-hole?
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  DNS over HTTPS and, eventually, certificate pinning in the WASM-based DoH client running inside your browser will render your Pi Hole useless. It'll all just be opaque TLS to your network gear. Network operators who legitimately need to control traffic on their networks are lumped in with human rights-violating nation states. That includes you on your network.
duxup 5y ago
I've watched a weird mix of "I don't like javascript" that usually actually translates to "I don't like what some people do with javascript." along side some cheer leading for webassembly... Now those obviously aren't entirely connected arguments, but whatever "I don't like what some people do with javascript" is supposed to mean, it has nothing to do with javascript. It's just what people do with it. Here we go now, we've got rando blobs you've got no idea what they're doing... this is not better.
- bushbaba 5y ago
  Reminds me of the pain with Java & flash on the web. What’s old is new again eh.
- bruce343434 5y ago
  Not like you know what that obfuscated minimized javascript was doing anyway.
vbezhenar 5y ago
You could do that years ago when canvas was introduced. Wasm is more readable than obfuscated JS. You can compile C to JS.
ryandrake 5y ago
User preference and configurability of hyperTEXT display has been totally thrown under the bus, increasingly throughout the web's existence. I remember when it was straightforward to have your own text color and font preference, and web sites didn't try to override them. You could even configure a brick wall GIF background for sites if you wanted to. Now, these preferences are buried and easy for a developer to ignore using CSS and JavaScript. And as you say, it'll get even worse. The user agent (who, by the way, you're writing your web site for) now has very little say in how a web page is rendered. Unpopular opinion on HN full of web devs, but I don't want my browser to be a "canvas" for some developer. I don't want it to be a "stable ABI" for some opaque binary app. I already have a platform for binary applications: It's called a desktop operating system. I wish more developers would go back to developing for that and leave the web alone. I want my web browser to display hyperTEXT documents, with links out to other hyperTEXT documents, and occasionally accept input from me via a FORM. And that's it. I understand that opinion makes me a minority nowadays, though. Maybe we should revitalize gopher or something--something to get back to the roots of fetching, displaying, and navigating information.
stefan_ 5y ago
This is what Flutter on the web is, by the way. You can try it out here: https://gallery.flutter.dev/#/ https://gallery.flutter.dev/#/ and marvel at the impossible to select text, one of the many affordances violently excised here. If it wasn't still incredibly slow even on a cutting-edge Zen3, Nvidia 3070 system they might almost be on to something here.
- ape4 5y ago
  A dystopia. You can't control-F in the page. Can't copy and paste a word you don't know into a translator or dictionary. Can't share text unofficially - like copy a sentence into a email, etc.
  - DrJokepu 5y ago
    Also, you know, accessibility. This could be a real serious problem for people with disabilities.
    - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      I'm hoping for a revamped EU accessibility act https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=1202 https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=1202 that also covers document and office applications, and with GDPR sized fines.
      - Silhouette 5y ago
        We have to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater here, though. Obviously accessibility is an important issue for both commercial and ethical reasons, but if you're talking about writing laws and severe penalties for breaking them then you will always have to choose what minimum standards you will always require and then accept that it might be unreasonable for a software developer to go further. For example, suppose the entire purpose of a certain office application is to draw some clever visualisation that helps the office workers to understand complex relationships in their business data. Maybe that presentation style has been chosen based on years of experience and saves a lot of time and avoids a lot of mistakes compared to a simple text report or table of figures. However, maybe it also doesn't work for someone whose vision is too limited to usefully see or interact with the visualisation. Perhaps you could present the same data and relationships in a different way, a format that would be more amenable to sound- or touch-based interfaces for those with severely limited or no vision. In reality, that might mean writing a second entirely separate application, one that might cost more than the original to implement and support, for an audience that will usually be very small and often empty. So where should the line be drawn? In an ideal world we want to be as inclusive as possible regardless of anyone's individual limitations, but we also want to provide the most effective presentation possible to those who don't have the same limitations. In general doing both might be prohibitively expensive, so how do you make realistic, ethical decisions in this space, and given that every software application is different, how do you codify the standards you want to make mandatory for the accessibility reasons?
spankalee 5y ago
I don't like this change, but it's not being done to "control to web".
eagsalazar2 5y ago
Man, this is a very dramatic interpretation of their intent. Docs doesn't even have ads. They actually do have issues rendering consistently across browsers (I ran into this just like 2 days ago where something that had been carefully laid out on Chrome looked different in Safari). My bigger criticism of this is that I imagine it was a very large refactor at a time when docs has barely evolved for years and still remains far behind desktop counterparts in many ways (although still slowly taking over because of vastly superior online collaboration).
- addison-lee 5y ago
  Ahh yes because Google, an ad company, will never implement this where they do have ads.
  - eagsalazar2 5y ago
    I never said they would never do this. I just said it was over dramatic and making big assumptions that this action by google was part of some nefarious plot to turn the internet back into corporate tv, especially given that there are very good reasons in this case to make this change without those assumptions.
comboy 5y ago
Web scrapping. Companies will just push their data to the giants. I did not read that sequence when I first heard about wasm. You made me sad. Of course there will be scrapping, using machine learning and GPUs and whatnot but it's... maybe I'm just old.
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  Do you mean scraping? If you meant scrapping, I certainly don't think the web should be scrapped.
whoopdedo 5y ago
> turns the web back into cable TV. You mean turns the web back into Flash. Which is somehow worse. How are they going to make this accessible? I doubt any screen readers would be able to recognize text drawn that way.
burlesona 5y ago
Just for what it’s worth, “word processors” are a logical starting point specifically because the APIs for text manipulation in the DOM are abysmal, and every in-browser WYSIWYG text editor is a steaming pile of hacks. Some of them work well despite this, but, it’s a horrible set of code to maintain and very, very hard to make a good user experience. One of the very hardest things to do well in the browser, actually. Thus I wouldn’t necessarily interpret Google Docs making this move as the start of an inescapable trend. It may be, or it may just be that certain kinds of applications (like Docs and Games) can work a lot better by providing their own rendering engine.
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  Furthermore, actually implementing your own text renderer and input engine in WASM is a different horrible nightmare, because you've now forfitted any chance of supporting IMEs (e.g. touch keyboards, pinyin/romaji/kanji input, iPadOS Scribble), you need to implement your own text selection inputs, your text won't show up in the accessibility tree, and you can't copy-paste without additional, browser-specific tweaks. The only reason to actually do this is if you can't use HTML. Source: I am a Ruffle developer and have had to do exactly this to support text input in old Flash games.
  - pmontra 5y ago
    > you can't copy-paste without additional, browser-specific tweaks Expect an AI-based OCR browser extension to copy text to the system clipboard. Possibly by sending screenshots to some centralized service ;-)
    - kbenson 5y ago
      This would be more funny if it was less prescient.
- bri3d 5y ago
  A million times this - having worked in this space, nobody wants to do this. I understand the cynicism, but the affordances provided by the browser for things like accessibility are very painful to give up. This isn't some dark pattern attempt to cut out whatever "openness" remains on the web, or to convert the browser into a display-streaming client for some sinister DRM reason. In my past job, we rewrote our spreadsheet rendering to use canvas and gained massively in simplicity and maintainability. And there was no obfuscation angle to it - we even shipped source maps! Handling accessibility and text input was hard (we ended up adopting a hybrid-DOM model where some things like input fields were still native ones, or shadowed by native ones), and even then it was still easier than dealing with browser rendering. This is simply a reasonable way to work around the DOM being trash. The way to fix this trend would be to reimagine the presentation layer of the browser as something other than a stack of hacks over hypertext, but so far nobody seems to have a good solution.
simias 5y ago
Google de-facto controls the browser but it doesn't control the OS, its motivation is absolutely transparent here: make the browser the OS. It even auto-updates transparently by default so Google can push its code almost live to its users. As someone who always fought against the bloat of the web and reimplementing everything on top of HTTP and JS I feel a bit like an anti-atomic weapon activist who, upon seeing the mushroom cloud in the distance, can utter a final "see, I told you so!" before being demapped by a G-shapped shockwave. The open web was fun while it lasted, but ads are more important.
icedchai 5y ago
We've come full circle. This could've been done decades ago, with Java applets.
crb002 5y ago
JS minification is old hat, and welcome to shrink binaries. Google for security reasons should probably release the source. Most security types welcome web-assembly over JS since there will be more Rust etc.
pier25 5y ago
> I didn't expect the first move towards canvas-only rendering to be traditional wordprocessors. It makes sense. Rich text editing on the web is a disaster.
macspoofing 5y ago
>I thought it was obvious[1][2] that the end game for those that want to control the web is sending opaque binary blobs of code that only use the browser for the canvas tag's framebuffer As opposed to a world where huge, unintelligible minified JavaScript blobs are sent to the browser?
tmcw 5y ago
Agree on all points but > Font rendering and layout can all easily be accomplished by embedding libraries like freetype. Whoooah no. This stuff is way, way, way harder than dropping in freetype.
FlyingSnake 5y ago
I literally had the same thought when I first heard of WebAssembly. Adblockers blocking your tracking JS/Cookies? Why not pass it via a binary blob though WASM and track the users? I know WASM is a boon to performance sensitive websites, but there are always players who would like to take advantage of the situation.
acituan 5y ago
> I thought it was obvious[1][2] that the end game for those that want to control the web is sending opaque binary blobs of code that only use the browser for the canvas tag's framebuffer. Google is also a search company, the product from which the majority of their ad revenue comes. Blobifying the web indiscriminately breaks search, so it is not in their interest to push this to reap some x% revenue loss from ad blockers. Incidentally, or not, a traditional wordprocessor itself is not an interesting search result and makes a perfect candidate for this type of rendering. There already exists compatibility layers with search for published documents. So absolutely nothing is lost for anyone, and I think it is an overgeneralization to take this as a sign of obvious doom to come.
baybal2 5y ago
You are completely correct. The end goal of people who introduced WASM was an ActiveX 2.0.
dheera 5y ago
I don't blame them, considering how damn hard it is to center something with CSS. With a canvas you just tell it where to display it and to hell with CSS.
86J8oyZv 5y ago
This is the endgame of putting JS/programmability (rather than just markup) in browsers at all. HTML and CSS are great for formatting documents. But, in spite of years of jQueries, Angulars, Reacts, Vues, and 10M other frameworks being implemented, HTML+CSS+JS is frankly awful for developing applications. Business needs have made us push them to be okay for enough form entry to collect credit card numbers and do billing stuff, but even then every step forward comes with a few steps back. An optimistic take is that this should mean we get better web apps and less JS garbage on web pages where we just want to read something and there’s no justification for having code execute when you visit the document. That’s the intent of WebAssembly and it makes sense. The reality is that the NYTs of the world will continue to put JS garbage all over pages that have no business executing any code. But WebAssembly doesn’t really have any bearing on that. It offers the opportunity to make things better. The organizations who seek to profit off the web and make it worse for the rest of us will still do so, with or without WebAssembly.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  I hear this take a lot. Why is HTML + JS awful for developing applications?
  - easrng 5y ago
    It wasn't designed to, it grew bit by bit with new features gradually being tacked on, so the APIs are inconsistent (For example,NodeList, HTMLCollection, and Array all have different methods and naming conventions) and poorly designed.
twistedpair 5y ago
> I didn't expect the first move towards canvas-only rendering to be traditional wordprocessors. Google Maps moved to Canvas/WebGL years ago. It's not the first move.
amelius 5y ago
> Font rendering and layout can all easily be accomplished by embedding libraries like freetype. Perhaps it's not so simple if you want the GPU to do the rendering.

by pdkl95 5y ago

sgt 5y ago

It's a bad thing in terms of openness but a good thing in terms of performance and making web applications more like real desktop applications. A lot of DOM work is a nightmare, so I sort of welcome to the Canvas based approach.

zozbot234 5y ago
DOM is just HTML/CSS. It's not a 'nightmare', it's actually a pretty good fit for the semantics of most UI's.
- kaliszad 5y ago
  Yes, DOM is "just" HTML and CSS with a JS API. All of that is quite broken in various places, the APIs usually rather bad, mutability everywhere and performance suffers as soon as you e.g. switch the cursor from an arrow to hand/ finger, there can be a complete re-render. Google especially is in a position to fix most of these things if they wanted to. They even have the best test-data of any company. But they choose to side-step some of these problems by introducing another, completely new technology and then a small team of people goes on to hack something useable using this technology as if they were a small startup. The problem is, Google is basically a collection of teams with very different focus points. Some are paid to develop new technology no matter if they want it for a specific product. Other people are paid to "improve" an existing product, e.g. Google Docs and have to use what is available. Any kind of exchange of information between teams is a friction and blocks things from being improved. At OrgPad, 10% of CPU time is the maximum we can use if we want a smooth experience. The rest is eaten by the browser and inefficiencies there. I don't think we are alone in stepping over bugs, idiotic APIs and implementation differences everywhere all the time. The fix is not to delegate most of the work to the web developer but for the browser and web standards people to step up and do a thorough job with existing stuff.
  - hnedeotes 5y ago
    I'm one of those persons that really want browsers to be viable options to building fully fledged applications but I sincerely like the core concepts of HTML and CSS. I think the biggest issue is that things kept on being tacked on the primitive specification to solve ever evolving needs. The browsers themselves are written in languages that are meant to go fast - which is important for drawing of elements, rebuilding trees, etc - but not good for doing concerted async operations in a structured fashion. Just looking at those codebases makes you want to stab your eyes with a fork up to your brain. In my, very valuable, opinion, a re-assessment of what HTML is (ignoring the name, and treating it as the language of the browser instead of hyper text) and what at web page can be - along with a browser designed to be multi-tabbed, async by nature, supporting advanced non-tree based layouts (maybe still trees, but trees that could be part of zindexed layers? detached layers that allowed for interaction handlers separate from the visual elements?) in a language that has tools to model those behaviours, could probably re-use all the lessons from HTML, CSS and JS apps. Of course, it would still be like building everything again - but I'm not sure wasm/canvas blobs is a better solution long-term.
- simiones 5y ago
  If you've ever used a real UI framework, HTML/CSS is absolutely a nightmare. It is missing almost entirely in any kind of useful controls, which is why there are so many myriads of control libraries. Edit: however, replacing HTML+CSS with a canvas is absolutely a step in the wrong direction. I'm advocating for a richer Web, not a stream of pixels controlled by Google.
  - gentleman11 5y ago
    Care to elaborate what “real ui frameworks” do better? What frameworks do you have in mind when you say that?
    - simiones 5y ago
      Sure! I'm thinking of things like QT, WPF, WinForms, Java Swing. What these have in common that is missing from HTML/CSS/DOM is a significant library of controls and layouts.
tengbretson 5y ago
We're just one more concession away from getting the performance we had 20 years ago with native applications. Edit: The path we're on just seems so obvious I kind of just want to skip ahead and get it over with. - Developers and content publishers love the ergonomics and control of just shipping WASM binaries that paint to a canvas and it becomes the de facto standard. - After 2-3 years of everyone's computer being used to surreptitiously mine crypto everywhere they go we re-learn the lessons of Java applets. - In comes browsers that require signed WASM binaries for your protection. The world is an app store. Curtains.
- goalieca 5y ago
  Careful here, these are more like thin clients with high network latencies.
  - EvanAnderson 5y ago
    There's local processing and peripherals. I think you're looking for the term "smart terminals". Something like these for the "modern era": https://www.curiousmarc.com/computing/hp-264x-terminals https://www.curiousmarc.com/computing/hp-264x-terminals
- tshaddox 5y ago
  Browsers still support arcane HMTL features from decades ago (and thus can display most web sites from decades ago). Other than things that were already decidedly not part of web standards (like Flash), I’m aware of very little if any backwards-incompatible changes made by popular browsers. So I'm having trouble seeing this slippery slope you’re describing.
- sgt 5y ago
  Funny. And then at some point someone will rediscover native apps.
OscarTheGrinch 5y ago
I, for one, welcome our new canvas based overlords.
dukeofdoom 5y ago
Couldn't agree more. Developer Lives Matter. Lifetimes have been lost to simple things like trying to get a modal popup to work.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Isn't that what <dialog> is for? That's just HTML plus minimal JS.
  - dukeofdoom 5y ago
    No, I wasn't talking about that. Before getting censored. I meant a dialog with a form on it.
- pleasedonot 5y ago
  Please don't riff on the Black Lives Matter movement with things that are more trivial than civil rights. I doubt your intentions were to delegitimize the movement, but still.
dahfizz 5y ago
> making web applications more like real desktop applications. Web developers are the only people who actually want this. Its not something that would benefit society / users.
- gentleman11 5y ago
  “As a user, I want my apps developers to have a good experience” - a scrum task
switch007 5y ago
> but a good thing in terms of performance Performance is a poison chalice. Many, many people were won over by Chrome's blistering speed. Now they won't have proper ad blocking.
- Sunspark 5y ago
  I offer Firefox as the solution.
  - switch007 5y ago
    Absolutely, Quantum was a big leap. But many people are devoted to chrome and so are developers. Many sites are still worse on Firefox than Chrome.
    - Sunspark 5y ago
      Ah, but this is in the eye of the beholder. For example, Firefox has an option to allow one to deselect the option "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above". I usually browse the web in aliased legible Verdana as a result. It also allows you to choose the colours of the background, links, etc. Chromium browsers do not allow you this choice. There, the philosophy seems to be that the web is a designer-driven layout medium and that the viewer should not have accessibility choices. Btw, some of the "sites worse", if you're referring to Google, that's them just breaking things intentionally. You can sometimes work around it by specifying a different useragent and then things are fast again until they change things again. As a browser, Firefox is standards compliant. I agree there are many applications that use a web interface as the GUI and a bunch were coded for IE6 or IE6 with ActiveX and don't display well (or at all) in Chrome. It really depends, but the problem isn't that Firefox follows standards, but that the developers did not follow standards.
nine_k 5y ago
> making web applications more like real desktop applications You mean, abandoning web applications and migrating to network-delivered desktop applications? Because nothing 'web' remains about them: no HTML, no links, no open standards.

EvanAnderson 5y ago

I am in complete agreement. When I've brought this up on HN in the past it's always been dismissed with "But accessibility!". A big company like Google can handle that just fine. Presumably they'll eventually port Chrome to WASM. Then they can completely control the browsing experience. To exert any control over our browsing experience we'll be single-stepping thru machine code. I had fun cracking Apple II and PC software back in the late 80s and early 90s but I'm not necessarily looking forward to doing that again.

spijdar 5y ago
> Presumably they'll eventually port Chrome to WASM. Then they can completely control the browsing experience. ...what? As opposed to shipping binary executables for an OS/arch combo, they'll ship a binary executable for WASM, and then a second binary executable for the OS? If they want to take Chrome closed source and make it fully obfuscated, they can do that already, with or without WASM. Chrome is already closed-source, only Chromium is open -- and we know Chrome has secret sauce in it not from the repos.
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  I didn't express that very eloquently. I expect there will be a WASM-based browser embedded within some (most?) websites, eventually. The public-facing webserver will serve-up the WASM-based "inner browser" and nothing else. Content will only be accessible via the "inner browser". Determined attackers will be able to extract the keys used by the "inner browser", for sure, but the average person won't be able to. It'll be packaged as a product, probably targeted at "traditional media" sites: Use this on your website and nobody can block your ads or bypass your paywall. You can use all your existing development tools, servers, etc, and it'll "Just Work".
  - blt 5y ago
    Wow, this is plausible and disgusting.
- jorvi 5y ago

est31 5y ago

Ad blockers could still "scroll" through a website, run an AI model on it to discover the ad sections, and cut them out. Even a simple model that filters out visual animations and replaces them with a static would be useful as a large annoying component of online ads is the movement and blinking etc. that make it hard to focus on the content. Dark mode etc can, too, be implemented to work in terms of framebuffers only. But yes, unless there is a serious need, canvas rendering is a severe regression.

anon_tor_12345 5y ago
>run an AI model what exactly would this AI model be trained on?
- iandanforth 5y ago
  Ads? The suggested approach is "from pixels" so any rendered ad is a source of training pixels.
tjpnz 5y ago
I've seen some rather atrocious techniques employed to bake ads into source but that can still be done without any performance impact. Making that work in WASM would require dynamic recompilation, doable perhaps for smaller apps but for behemoths like Gmail and Docs I couldn't see even Google getting that to scale. I think we'll still have browsers performing additional HTTP requests for that stuff, at least in the short to medium term. So traditional adblocking techniques will still be viable.
asciimov 5y ago
It will be like cutting out the ads in a newspaper. Lots of holes, everywhere.
- exhilaration 5y ago
  The difference from a physical newspaper is that on a computer we don't have to leave holes, we can replace them with beautiful artwork or our favorite cat pictures. That's still a hell of a lot better than ads.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

shadowgovt 5y ago

Is ad blocking Google Docs really a concern though?

Miraste 5y ago
No, but how much longer do you think it will take them to bring this to Google and YouTube and AdWords?
- yhoneycomb 5y ago
  Honestly if they did that I think I’d strongly consider paid alternatives to YouTube. Most of the channels I like are on curiosity stream/nebula. I’ve never subscribed because I don’t feel like I have a reason to. But that would definitely give me a reason.
  - google234123 5y ago
    Or you could just pay for Youtube which removed ads.
    - yhoneycomb 5y ago
      I’d rather not support a monopoly
slater 5y ago
i think the worry is more about the next steps, not google docs per se

rektide 5y ago

Treating the web browser like a VNC terminal, a way to push pixels, is just a vile degredation of the web. The web is not applications. People view the web via a user-agent, a tool that let's them navigate & view hypertext as they want. Breaking away from hypertext, pushing images in people's faces: it's not the web. It's an assault, a great step backwards. It's an attack on the internet. Absolutely people are definitely starting to treat the web as a big canvas. Those people are doing great injustice & cruelty to one of the only pro-user pro-agency information technologies ever created.

dahfizz 5y ago
> The web is not applications Unfortunately, all the people who work on the web disagree. They need what could be a simple, text based site into a full blown "application" to justify their own job.
- rektide 5y ago
  The web can do programmatic, interactive systems very well. In my opinion, it does it much much better than applications. And it should be doing it. (Alas, a huge huge huge amount of web applications don't espouse the virtues of the web, don't use url based routing, don't have good service worker caching, & countless other horrific faults. I continue to see that as not the web's fault but I think there's a lot of room for opinions on this, at least.) But interactive web systems shouldn't regress to the hostile, anti-user, anti-extensibility stance of an application. It should continue to offer the upsides of being the web.

iandanforth 5y ago

And all the problems solved by HTML and CSS will be new again, there will be many new incompatible frameworks for handling layout and styling, a blinking cursor will again take 200x the CPU it should to implement. Ugh.

RhodesianHunter 5y ago
I for one would welcome the death of HTML and CSS. Unfortunately I suspect they will merely be re-used for this.
- falcolas 5y ago
  HTML and CSS are fantastic; when used what they were designed for. Document markup and display. I blame webapp developers for the scope creep and subsequent denigration of a perfectly reasonable set of standards.
  - j-krieger 5y ago
    HTML and CSS were never denigrated. There's not one superficial feature which doesn't make sense. Most of it is barebones. If I had to pick one feature the blows the scope out of proportion, it would be the `is` selector, but that's the only one I can think of
    - falcolas 5y ago
      Denigrated ~= put down. And there's plenty of examples within the comments of this article where people - webapp developers - harp on how bad HTML and CSS are, because HTML and CSS weren't designed for webapps.
      - madeofpalk 5y ago
        CSS is the worst layout language, except for all the others.
  - hueti 5y ago

sambroner 5y ago

Is this canvas actually rendered with WASM? I don't see WASM in dev tools on their sample doc. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N1XaAI4ZlCUHNWJBXJUBFjxSTlsD5XctCz6LB3Calcg/preview#heading=h.rrar1dgps27e https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N1XaAI4ZlCUHNWJBXJUBFjxS...

brabel 5y ago
You're right, there seems to be only JS code running in this example... and it performs very well for me, actually. Everything people were complaining about seems to work just fine, including text selection and Ctrl+F!

ballenf 5y ago

WASM plus encryption will mean it could be illegal to decrypt/alter website code just like a Netflix video stream. Adblock criminalization is close.

nine_k 5y ago
Adblock / pihole technical impossibility, too.
- entropicdrifter 5y ago
  Maybe they could bypass it in Chrome, but it wouldn't make it impossible to use for anyone smart enough to set up a pihole.
  - EvanAnderson 5y ago
    The WASM code will eventually implement its own DNS analog (or use DoH with a pinned certificate). It'll all be completely opaque TLS to your Pi Hole. Your Pi Hole is the same thing, functionally, as the tools a nation state hostile to human rights uses to filter the Internet. You'll get the same treatment that they do.
    - withinboredom 5y ago
      That’s when you install squid and have it do the terminating TLS. They won’t pin the certs, too many corps do this already and not to mention certificate lifetime is in the realm of leaving a browser open for weeks.
      - deeter72 5y ago
        Deploying squid is not simple as deploying a PiHole.
  - shawnz 5y ago
    DNS blocking is way more trivial to bypass than client-side blocking.

dahfizz 5y ago

Yet another reason to use Pi-hole. The web browser is the wrong place to try and fight against this sort of thing. Secure your home network once instead of fighting an arms race on each device you have.

kaba0 5y ago
How does it help here? They can trivially include ads server-side, pi-hole would see nothing at all.
- guntars 5y ago
  You can do it, but it’s not done commonly. The most common way ads get onto the page is by including a third party script which is easily blocked.
  - irrational 5y ago
    Today, but this entire discussion is about how things will work tomorrow.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  It would be easy to implement server-side rendering, but it carries significant cost in processing time and networking. If they can block all adblocking browser extensions by abusing WASM, the cost of server-side rendering will outweigh the 0.0001% of people that have a pihole set up.
duxup 5y ago
Can you target "opaque binary blobs of code" with a pie-hole?
EvanAnderson 5y ago
DNS over HTTPS and, eventually, certificate pinning in the WASM-based DoH client running inside your browser will render your Pi Hole useless. It'll all just be opaque TLS to your network gear. Network operators who legitimately need to control traffic on their networks are lumped in with human rights-violating nation states. That includes you on your network.

duxup 5y ago

I've watched a weird mix of "I don't like javascript" that usually actually translates to "I don't like what some people do with javascript." along side some cheer leading for webassembly... Now those obviously aren't entirely connected arguments, but whatever "I don't like what some people do with javascript" is supposed to mean, it has nothing to do with javascript. It's just what people do with it. Here we go now, we've got rando blobs you've got no idea what they're doing... this is not better.

bushbaba 5y ago
Reminds me of the pain with Java & flash on the web. What’s old is new again eh.
bruce343434 5y ago
Not like you know what that obfuscated minimized javascript was doing anyway.

vbezhenar 5y ago

You could do that years ago when canvas was introduced. Wasm is more readable than obfuscated JS. You can compile C to JS.

ryandrake 5y ago

User preference and configurability of hyperTEXT display has been totally thrown under the bus, increasingly throughout the web's existence. I remember when it was straightforward to have your own text color and font preference, and web sites didn't try to override them. You could even configure a brick wall GIF background for sites if you wanted to. Now, these preferences are buried and easy for a developer to ignore using CSS and JavaScript. And as you say, it'll get even worse. The user agent (who, by the way, you're writing your web site for) now has very little say in how a web page is rendered. Unpopular opinion on HN full of web devs, but I don't want my browser to be a "canvas" for some developer. I don't want it to be a "stable ABI" for some opaque binary app. I already have a platform for binary applications: It's called a desktop operating system. I wish more developers would go back to developing for that and leave the web alone. I want my web browser to display hyperTEXT documents, with links out to other hyperTEXT documents, and occasionally accept input from me via a FORM. And that's it. I understand that opinion makes me a minority nowadays, though. Maybe we should revitalize gopher or something--something to get back to the roots of fetching, displaying, and navigating information.

stefan_ 5y ago

This is what Flutter on the web is, by the way. You can try it out here: https://gallery.flutter.dev/#/ https://gallery.flutter.dev/#/ and marvel at the impossible to select text, one of the many affordances violently excised here. If it wasn't still incredibly slow even on a cutting-edge Zen3, Nvidia 3070 system they might almost be on to something here.

ape4 5y ago
A dystopia. You can't control-F in the page. Can't copy and paste a word you don't know into a translator or dictionary. Can't share text unofficially - like copy a sentence into a email, etc.
- DrJokepu 5y ago
  Also, you know, accessibility. This could be a real serious problem for people with disabilities.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    I'm hoping for a revamped EU accessibility act https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=1202 https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=1202 that also covers document and office applications, and with GDPR sized fines.
    - Silhouette 5y ago
      We have to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater here, though. Obviously accessibility is an important issue for both commercial and ethical reasons, but if you're talking about writing laws and severe penalties for breaking them then you will always have to choose what minimum standards you will always require and then accept that it might be unreasonable for a software developer to go further. For example, suppose the entire purpose of a certain office application is to draw some clever visualisation that helps the office workers to understand complex relationships in their business data. Maybe that presentation style has been chosen based on years of experience and saves a lot of time and avoids a lot of mistakes compared to a simple text report or table of figures. However, maybe it also doesn't work for someone whose vision is too limited to usefully see or interact with the visualisation. Perhaps you could present the same data and relationships in a different way, a format that would be more amenable to sound- or touch-based interfaces for those with severely limited or no vision. In reality, that might mean writing a second entirely separate application, one that might cost more than the original to implement and support, for an audience that will usually be very small and often empty. So where should the line be drawn? In an ideal world we want to be as inclusive as possible regardless of anyone's individual limitations, but we also want to provide the most effective presentation possible to those who don't have the same limitations. In general doing both might be prohibitively expensive, so how do you make realistic, ethical decisions in this space, and given that every software application is different, how do you codify the standards you want to make mandatory for the accessibility reasons?

spankalee 5y ago

I don't like this change, but it's not being done to "control to web".

eagsalazar2 5y ago

Man, this is a very dramatic interpretation of their intent. Docs doesn't even have ads. They actually do have issues rendering consistently across browsers (I ran into this just like 2 days ago where something that had been carefully laid out on Chrome looked different in Safari). My bigger criticism of this is that I imagine it was a very large refactor at a time when docs has barely evolved for years and still remains far behind desktop counterparts in many ways (although still slowly taking over because of vastly superior online collaboration).

addison-lee 5y ago
Ahh yes because Google, an ad company, will never implement this where they do have ads.
- eagsalazar2 5y ago
  I never said they would never do this. I just said it was over dramatic and making big assumptions that this action by google was part of some nefarious plot to turn the internet back into corporate tv, especially given that there are very good reasons in this case to make this change without those assumptions.

comboy 5y ago

Web scrapping. Companies will just push their data to the giants. I did not read that sequence when I first heard about wasm. You made me sad. Of course there will be scrapping, using machine learning and GPUs and whatnot but it's... maybe I'm just old.

frosted-flakes 5y ago
Do you mean scraping? If you meant scrapping, I certainly don't think the web should be scrapped.

whoopdedo 5y ago

> turns the web back into cable TV. You mean turns the web back into Flash. Which is somehow worse. How are they going to make this accessible? I doubt any screen readers would be able to recognize text drawn that way.

burlesona 5y ago

Just for what it’s worth, “word processors” are a logical starting point specifically because the APIs for text manipulation in the DOM are abysmal, and every in-browser WYSIWYG text editor is a steaming pile of hacks. Some of them work well despite this, but, it’s a horrible set of code to maintain and very, very hard to make a good user experience. One of the very hardest things to do well in the browser, actually. Thus I wouldn’t necessarily interpret Google Docs making this move as the start of an inescapable trend. It may be, or it may just be that certain kinds of applications (like Docs and Games) can work a lot better by providing their own rendering engine.

kmeisthax 5y ago
Furthermore, actually implementing your own text renderer and input engine in WASM is a different horrible nightmare, because you've now forfitted any chance of supporting IMEs (e.g. touch keyboards, pinyin/romaji/kanji input, iPadOS Scribble), you need to implement your own text selection inputs, your text won't show up in the accessibility tree, and you can't copy-paste without additional, browser-specific tweaks. The only reason to actually do this is if you can't use HTML. Source: I am a Ruffle developer and have had to do exactly this to support text input in old Flash games.
- pmontra 5y ago
  > you can't copy-paste without additional, browser-specific tweaks Expect an AI-based OCR browser extension to copy text to the system clipboard. Possibly by sending screenshots to some centralized service ;-)
  - kbenson 5y ago
    This would be more funny if it was less prescient.
bri3d 5y ago
A million times this - having worked in this space, nobody wants to do this. I understand the cynicism, but the affordances provided by the browser for things like accessibility are very painful to give up. This isn't some dark pattern attempt to cut out whatever "openness" remains on the web, or to convert the browser into a display-streaming client for some sinister DRM reason. In my past job, we rewrote our spreadsheet rendering to use canvas and gained massively in simplicity and maintainability. And there was no obfuscation angle to it - we even shipped source maps! Handling accessibility and text input was hard (we ended up adopting a hybrid-DOM model where some things like input fields were still native ones, or shadowed by native ones), and even then it was still easier than dealing with browser rendering. This is simply a reasonable way to work around the DOM being trash. The way to fix this trend would be to reimagine the presentation layer of the browser as something other than a stack of hacks over hypertext, but so far nobody seems to have a good solution.

simias 5y ago

Google de-facto controls the browser but it doesn't control the OS, its motivation is absolutely transparent here: make the browser the OS. It even auto-updates transparently by default so Google can push its code almost live to its users. As someone who always fought against the bloat of the web and reimplementing everything on top of HTTP and JS I feel a bit like an anti-atomic weapon activist who, upon seeing the mushroom cloud in the distance, can utter a final "see, I told you so!" before being demapped by a G-shapped shockwave. The open web was fun while it lasted, but ads are more important.

icedchai 5y ago

We've come full circle. This could've been done decades ago, with Java applets.

crb002 5y ago

JS minification is old hat, and welcome to shrink binaries. Google for security reasons should probably release the source. Most security types welcome web-assembly over JS since there will be more Rust etc.

pier25 5y ago

> I didn't expect the first move towards canvas-only rendering to be traditional wordprocessors. It makes sense. Rich text editing on the web is a disaster.

macspoofing 5y ago

tmcw 5y ago

Agree on all points but > Font rendering and layout can all easily be accomplished by embedding libraries like freetype. Whoooah no. This stuff is way, way, way harder than dropping in freetype.

FlyingSnake 5y ago

I literally had the same thought when I first heard of WebAssembly. Adblockers blocking your tracking JS/Cookies? Why not pass it via a binary blob though WASM and track the users? I know WASM is a boon to performance sensitive websites, but there are always players who would like to take advantage of the situation.

acituan 5y ago

> I thought it was obvious[1][2] that the end game for those that want to control the web is sending opaque binary blobs of code that only use the browser for the canvas tag's framebuffer. Google is also a search company, the product from which the majority of their ad revenue comes. Blobifying the web indiscriminately breaks search, so it is not in their interest to push this to reap some x% revenue loss from ad blockers. Incidentally, or not, a traditional wordprocessor itself is not an interesting search result and makes a perfect candidate for this type of rendering. There already exists compatibility layers with search for published documents. So absolutely nothing is lost for anyone, and I think it is an overgeneralization to take this as a sign of obvious doom to come.

baybal2 5y ago

You are completely correct. The end goal of people who introduced WASM was an ActiveX 2.0.

dheera 5y ago

I don't blame them, considering how damn hard it is to center something with CSS. With a canvas you just tell it where to display it and to hell with CSS.

86J8oyZv 5y ago

This is the endgame of putting JS/programmability (rather than just markup) in browsers at all. HTML and CSS are great for formatting documents. But, in spite of years of jQueries, Angulars, Reacts, Vues, and 10M other frameworks being implemented, HTML+CSS+JS is frankly awful for developing applications. Business needs have made us push them to be okay for enough form entry to collect credit card numbers and do billing stuff, but even then every step forward comes with a few steps back. An optimistic take is that this should mean we get better web apps and less JS garbage on web pages where we just want to read something and there’s no justification for having code execute when you visit the document. That’s the intent of WebAssembly and it makes sense. The reality is that the NYTs of the world will continue to put JS garbage all over pages that have no business executing any code. But WebAssembly doesn’t really have any bearing on that. It offers the opportunity to make things better. The organizations who seek to profit off the web and make it worse for the rest of us will still do so, with or without WebAssembly.

endisneigh 5y ago
I hear this take a lot. Why is HTML + JS awful for developing applications?
- easrng 5y ago
  It wasn't designed to, it grew bit by bit with new features gradually being tacked on, so the APIs are inconsistent (For example,NodeList, HTMLCollection, and Array all have different methods and naming conventions) and poorly designed.

twistedpair 5y ago

> I didn't expect the first move towards canvas-only rendering to be traditional wordprocessors. Google Maps moved to Canvas/WebGL years ago. It's not the first move.

amelius 5y ago

> Font rendering and layout can all easily be accomplished by embedding libraries like freetype. Perhaps it's not so simple if you want the GPU to do the rendering.