[jarjoura]

WASM is kind of coming full circle back around to when browsers used to support running Java Applets, or flash, or even ActiveX, however, this time, WASM is safe and is built into the browser.

Figma has been the one platform to take full advantage of it in really jaw-dropping ways that proved you could write real creative professional productive software only in the frame of a Chrome window.

It's just that WASM is not really practical for use for most things you want in a web browser, though the tooling to spit out WASM modules seem to keep getting better.

[mminer237]

I mostly agree, but for most of its life, the Flash runtime was ~1MB and shared among every site. Every site needing to download a separate 38MB runtime is an insane amount of overhead.

[vacuity]

Could the WASM runtime eventually be shared like that? Also, is there a reason why the overhead is so large compared to Flash?

[vacuity]

What are more uses that WASM (or any theoretical technology, really) could have for a web browser? Do you mean scripting to customize the browser itself?