[amelius]

Once people can run JavaScript and WASM in a sandboxed environment (the browser), you might as well give them the ability to run a rendering engine. There is nothing magical about rendering engines.

Comparison with Flash et al. is not accurate anymore, since these ran in an unprotected environment. Also, they were cumbersome install whereas WASM apps don't need installation (but can live in a cache if desired, and could even be shared among websites).

[dTal]

"Cumbersome installs" and "unprotected environment" were not why people hated Flash. People hated flash because it couldn't be {scraped, crawled, searched}, broke elementary browser controls like copy/paste and the back button, resulted in laggy and clunky UIs, and was excessively heavy on bandwidth. All of this would apply just as much to WASM 'apps'.

Fundamentally the problem is the conflict between the browser as an 'app' platform and the browser as a document viewer. Put simply, would you rather your user interface be 1) a magnificent piece of software with thousands of man-years put into it, debugged over decades, where every use case has been meticulously considered, or 2) a shitty script written by an overworked web developer?