"Why should WebAssembly succeed where previous attempts (such as Adobe Flash and Google Portable Native Client) have failed?"
Failed????
Excuse me, I haven't even BEGUN to scratch the surface of the awesomeness that is pnacl in my own project!
Failed????
Excuse me, I haven't even BEGUN to scratch the surface of the awesomeness that is pnacl in my own project!
Asm.js "cheated" by creating a path forward that did not require consensus. Mozilla used it to innovate without needing to argue with anyone else. For other vendors, asm.js would technically "work" without other vendors putting in any technical or political investment. But, the hook was that if they didn't get on board eventually, their browsers would start to look bad if they ran asm.js sites poorly.
WebAssembly is the outcome of Mozilla's trick. Now that all of the vendors have slowly become convinced over a period of years that there is a smooth, gradual path forward over the next several years that does not involve any technical or political chasms to cross, they are starting to work together to make it happen.
Technically it was a plugin for Pepper and the only difference between it and Flash was that it was open source and only available to Chrome.
Agreed. Web Assembly is the solution :)
Even if Mozilla had the will, they really don't have any way to contribute very significantly to the development effort, because it sort of requires a lot of very talented people getting paid large sums of money for long periods of time... which is obviously something that Google can afford to do.
I think everyone has always known that NPAPI was eventually going to have to be completely overhauled or even replaced. For anyone to constantly harp on the idea that "all that matters is the open web" when they come from the very same organization -- although going by a different name -- for which the original binary plugin architecture was named (Netscape Plugin API) is just patently absurd.
There is so much quality, freely available C/C++ code in this world that it is pretty mind boggling, and the purely technical achievement of allowing this code to be efficiently used by end users through the web platform is, again, a fairly mind boggling idea.
I'm not saying that this web assembly concept won't have any use cases whatsoever in the future, but I am saying that the proven PNaCl technology that exists right now is way, way too powerful for any web-based applications developer worth his or her soul to pass up very easily.
And implementing a modern JS engine isn't? Or developing Rust? Come on.
The objections that many other browser vendors have to integrating PNaCl into the Web platform have been detailed repeatedly and have nothing to do with "X browser vendor doesn't have the talent on staff to implement the technology".
Today using Ajax is better practice because it integrates better with the browser and it'll work on mobile.
From the Native Client wikipedia page:
As of 13 May 2010, Google's open source browser, Chromium, was the only web browser to utilize the new browser plug-in model.[28] Mozilla has announced that they are "not interested in or working on Pepper at this time."[29] As of 2015, Pepper is supported by Chrome, Chromium and Opera.
Safari and IE/Edge automatically don't matter because they are exclusive to their respective [proprietary] host operating systems.
That leaves Firefox.
Does anyone really think there is legitimate competition between Chrome and Firefox anymore?
I mean don't get me wrong, Firefox was a godsend in the bad old days of M$IE domination...
But this is 2015, and Google is basically Skynet, while Firefox is not much more than a warm, fuzzy memory.
Seriously... does anyone really want to turn this into a battle between Google and Mozilla?
My original reply was to a part of the article that talked about the "evil" non-open nature of web-technologies that are not humanly readable, textual HTML/CSS/JS. Then someone replied that PNaCl is only supported by a single vendor. Then I said that was a factually incorrect assertion, with the response being that I was engaged in hair splitting.
So then, I suggested that we should examine the rest of the vendors. In the morals based context of this entire subthread, I think it is plainly obvious that Safari and IE/Edge don't have any place here, when it comes to the question of whether PNaCl is a "good" technology, based simply on the question of the proportion of vendors that happen to support it.
If you are instead talking in a purely pragmatic, capitalist sense... then of course all that matters is brute numbers. But then there is no real discussion to be had, because in the cold, hard business world, whoever wins is just whoever wins. A equals A. It's a mere tautology.
Your whole line of argument is confusing.