I hope not. And if WASM does get access to browser APIs, I hope it will be behind some sort of user-visible confirmation, to discourage causal use. Modern web

I hope not. And if WASM does get access to browser APIs, I hope it will be behind some sort of user-visible confirmation, to discourage causal use. Modern web is not always user friendly, and many users benefit from ad blocking, data extraction, per-site fixeups and so on. The limited and flaky Javascript helps a lot - we can block the 3rd party script, and the pages will continue displaying without the ads; any data fetching is via browser's http engine and in most cases using JSON or XML format; and the sites are expected to support a wide range of browser features so they are often compatible with much older/newer browsers. Now imagine web using "compiled language" model (or if you are old enough, remember ActiveX or Flash-as-entire-website): you get that immutable blob of binary code and there is very little you can do. Reverse-engineering it is non-trivial, takes a lot of time and any patches you produce may break with the next release. A trivial change like making input box a big bigger is a major effort. (one may say: "but wait! WASM will only replace Javascript, the HTML/DOM will still stay around, so it would not be that bad!". You are too optimistic, I bet there right now, there are people who want to do it all in WASM and only need canvas from web browser.)