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by pepsi-not-coke 483 days ago
I proposed a similar idea (before WASM was a thing) in 2015 on the W3 TAG mailing list, where I simply said why can't the site owners tell the user's browser what browser engine, including specialized ones, should be loaded to render and interact with their site/app. It was dismissed with idiots from the browser vendors saying it's impossible because of ABI compatibility etc. I kid you not, 10 years ago, and then someone from Meta tweeted the same idea 2 years later (the guy behind Slick Carousel) when WASM was a thing, but he did not specify WASM, and I told him that I had brought it up, too. This is not a new idea, but I'm glad to see renewed interest and WASM as the way to do it.
1 comments

The Content-Type header tells your Firefox 3 browser whether to use the HTML rendering engine, the XHTML rendering engine, the XUL rendering engine, or the Adobe Flash rendering engine. Is that what you mean?
No, that does not solve the problem of the Google monopoly. Not a fixed set contained within one browser engine, but the browser engine itself, like Webkit vs some other engine vs some specialized engines. If your engine-host browser does not have a give engine or specific version of an engine it downloads it and caches it. WASM/Wayland makes the idea feasible, loading lightweight WASM modules.