I'm seeing a ton of snarky comments, but isn't this what exactly WebAssemly is about (which I see people praising everyday as it opens up possibilities)
Actually, if I could have Photoshop run in a browser, with its full feature set, and running at >90% of full native speed, that would be pretty awesome. And I'd even be willing to wait for the multi-GB download as long as it only happened once (with small deltas thereafter).
Not saying we're there yet, but it's not hard to see where WASM could take us.
> Actually, if I could have Photoshop run in a browser, with its full feature set, and running at >90% of full native speed, that would be pretty awesome.
You won't get in the same universe as that until the web grows real threading support. Not this no-shared-data, ultra expensive, ultra heavy webworker nonsense.
Given SharedArrayBuffer seems to be un-shippable now due to Spectre, the planned future of WASM's threading seems uncertain. And without that WASM seems rather pointless to be honest. You just can't compete with native at anything compute when you can't use 80%+ of the CPU.
It would be awesome indeed, but the disk cache can't grow indefinitely. I can't imagine anyone looking at their browser's 20GB disk cache and say it's ok.
How do people install their AAA games and Photoshop today? I'd think the majority downloaded them, right?
There are plenty of downsides to having ubiquitous WASM-compiled cross-platform "browser-native" apps, and having basically everything forcefully turned into an experience akin to ChromeOS out of convenience for app developers, but that doesn't feel like one.
I mean, web apps today are optimized to get a click-and-play feeling. Software like Photoshop or GTA5 isn't optimized for that, you need to download and install them for hours.
I can't imagine many people would like to download a 60GB AAA game or something like Photoshop to run it in the browser.