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by maven29 1370 days ago
Wouldn't that imply that first-party appstores must remain the only app delivery mechanism?

I don't think the economics of write-once-run-anywhere are going to change anytime soon. so WASM is a welcome shift closer to the metal, I'd say.
2 comments
encryptluks2 1370 days ago
No, it would imply that authors that want to create cross-platform apps would learn how to actually create cross-platform apps or create PWAs which are already cross-platform.
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maven29 1370 days ago
PWAs are a real tragedy of the commons with no platform owner willing to extend first-class UX flows due to competing interests as well as adverserial risks from bad-faith actors.

From a security/privacy perspective electron-esque apps are no different from native apps, and divorced from the browser UX, PWAs only inherit the trust they cultivated while running in the browser. They are just webapps with some quality-of-life sprinkled on top, after all.

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encryptluks2 1370 days ago
Electron apps are often pulling in hundreds of unvetted npm packages and then given direct read/write access to the entire file system. I'm okay with browser security overall for PWAs as I don't want websites to be able to break out of the sandbox and I want permission prompts when they want access to perform specific actions, but I can still inspect the code more freely to see what is happening behind the scenes and say no I don't trust this developer to have read/write access.

With WASM, it is like machine code for the browser meant to obscure what is even happening and you are supposed to just trust it and I don't. I don't trust it to not be abused to push more privacy violations and I don't trust most web developers enough to not just pull in a huge framework with no clue what they are doing and to make accessible fast sites using it.

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maven29 1370 days ago
Wouldn't dependency hijacking only be an issue during build/packaging, rather than installation when everything is frozen? All you're going to see as an end-user is a prebuilt binary that doesn't even know what NPM is. Again, this is no different from native apps.

Native apps are objectively worse than WASM in terms of security/privacy risks as they have access to all userspace syscalls. It's not like WASM bytecode can link against system libraries. Everything has to go through the browser/runtime sandbox. The only real risk here is side-channel attacks like Meltdown.

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encryptluks2 1370 days ago
Again though, they are already sandbox frameworks for the desktop for native apps. There is not a need to have the web browser, a notoriously anti-privacy component, as a DRM player for non-DRM content.
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perryizgr8 1370 days ago
> Wouldn't that imply that first-party appstores must remain the only app delivery mechanism?

No, not at all. It means users can run whatever software they want on their machine.

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