[jahewson]

Google created pretty much this, called it PNaCl and shipped it in Chrome. It now has been retired in favor of WASM.

[AndrewDucker]

For the reasoning behind this, see https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/FAQ.md#why...

[pjmlp]

Because Mozilla went political and came up with asm.js as counter technology.

[afiori]

Or as some other (like, eg Google itself) would say:

> Because Mozilla went political and came up with asm.js as better technology.

[pjmlp]

I am pretty sure that asm.js would not happened if Chrome already had the market share it enjoys nowadays.

WASM is still catching up to PNaCL in performance, hardly better.