[phkahler]

>> My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking

The answer to that is to disable Web Assembly, much like a lot of people disable JS. The whole idea of running other peoples code on your machine is the problem, and it baffles me that browser companies are still trying to enable more and more of this. I don't want your code running on my computer.

[JeremyNT]

That's great, until all the major corporate sites you actually use stop serving any content in HTML.

This future seems inevitable. The only sites you'll be able to actually use without some custom web assembly renderer will be those which don't serve ads at all now - wikis, open source projects, non profits, corporate web sites, etc. Any site funded by ad revenue will effectively remove itself from the web and into its own web assembly app instead.

We might even see the rebirth of something like AOL, a meta app that will be a portal to render content for others who want to use the platform. It might even just be an upcoming version of amp, or a new feature offered by Facebook or cloudflare...

[krapp]

It's funny because all the major corporate sites could already have stopped serving HTML and just gone completely with Flash, Silverlight or Java, and yet the doomsday scenario never happened. Hell, Android apps are basically the closed "meta apps" you're talking about, and have been around for years, and yet corporate, ad-driven sites still use HTML.

I don't see why Webassembly should the inevitable slippery slope to the entire web becoming some kind of closed source binary-only dystopia, other than it being loosely associated with Javascript, which half of HN hates and fears to a degree bordering on mania. The FUD really needs to end already.

[pixl97]

>and just gone completely with Flash, Silverlight or Java

Not sure what you mean by that. There were plenty of sites not usable at times because of their use of java or flash.

[krapp]

The thesis is that the existence of Webassembly, alone, means that all ad-supported sites will inevitably be rewritten entirely as WASM blobs in order to prevent the use of ad blockers. The typical doomsday scenario also includes the conversion of rest of the web to WASM, with support for HTML being entirely deprecated in all browsers, so that corporate interests can lock down, centralize and control the web entirely.

I'm claiming that thesis is incorrect because prior methods existed and still exist to encode websites as embedded binary applications, yet ad-driven sites still primarily use HTML, and the HTML driven web still exists.

How usable sites using java and flash were isn't relevant. Either all ad-driven sites seek to maximize their control over the end user by any available means at all cost, or they don't. As they evidently don't, the slippery slope of WASM leading to the end of the free web seems unlikely.

[JeremyNT]

> The thesis is that the existence of Webassembly, alone, means that all ad-supported sites will inevitably be rewritten entirely as WASM blobs in order to prevent the use of ad blockers. The typical doomsday scenario also includes the conversion of rest of the web to WASM, with support for HTML being entirely deprecated in all browsers, so that corporate interests can lock down, centralize and control the web entirely.

The thesis is that WASM will be the form of HTML's destruction, not that it is the only tool capable of it.

A confluence of trend lines lead it to be "in the right place at the right time." We've already come to accept that much of the web requires javascript, if it works in Google Chrome then that's fine, and video content requires DRM blobs.

The public is ready for this, and ad-supported content providers are floundering even though the fed keeps printing money.

With how much money is spent on bogus technical solutions in the ad space with marginal or no recognizable benefit, the time is right for innovation, and WASM is arriving just in time. Just like with AMP, I'm sure WASM-AMP will be sold for its amazing performance characteristics, because the modern web is so full of trash how could it not be at least better than the status quo?

WASM isn't some uniquely horrific development, it's just the next evolution in the downward trajectory.