[eslaught]

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.

[kllrnohj]

> 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.

[ori_b]

I can see where web assembly could take us, but I am confused about why people seem to want to go there.

[pjmlp]

Because Flash, Applets, .NET, Silverlight, ActiveX, NaCL,....

Difference being that WASM is kind of blessed format.

[ori_b]

The problems with the alternatives you listed wouldn't have been reduced with more blessing.

[pjmlp]

So what makes Flash => WebAssembly more acceptable than Flash?

[ori_b]

When did I say webassembly was more acceptable than flash?

[ihalip]

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.