[lmkg]

I mean that's still basically what they tried to do at the time. They were trying to get them through web standards committees and everything.

IIRC a big reason it didn't end up working was because NaCl was such a "big" technology and asm.js such a "small" one that asm.js was able to reach production-ready first despite starting work several years later.

[mccr8]

The cute thing about asm.js is that it was fully backwards compatible with the web: it was just a lot slower without dedicated support. So Epic or whomever could put out a demo that would run just fine in Chrome, but the performance was a lot worse than Firefox which had a dedicated compilation pipeline, so it made Chrome look bad.

[JoshTriplett]

Exactly. "You can't not support it; you can only be slow."

[pjmlp]

The big difference was that they lacked the market share they enjoy nowadays, with their forks and Electron crap.

[p_l]

The way I remember it, NaCl and PNaCl ended up nowhere not because big, but because Mozilla, then with big influence on standards, declared them not web enough for the crime of not being JavaScript and pushed against any addition of it into Gecko in any form and promoted "JavaScript is all you need" including an early demo of decoding video in JS - which I recall disgusted me because I somehow knew it would take away various technical issues preventing proprietary encoding from closing down web videos.

Funnily enough, NaCl had its origins in Mozilla extension, with old versions IIRC mentioning lineage starting in Google Gears extension for Firefox