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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

Both of those are in standardization, not yet part of the Wasm spec. Google has more of a "Ready! Fire! Aim! Fire again!" approach and is more readily amenable to releasing implementations of unfinished specs, where Apple has more of a "Ready! Aim! Aim! Fire!" approach and is generally reluctant to do that. (I can't speak for Firefox.)

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There's definitely a late adopter/early adopter divide here.

I have found myself wondering what good examples there are of successful (Ready Fire Aim) early-draft-standard adoption on the web. CSS in early Internet Explorer is one of them -- that was a choice that ended a ridiculous, unworkable not-invented-here adventure at Netscape.

But on the flip side, I am reminded of (Google) Gears, which was promoted as a solution but was really only a technology demonstrator for the idea that ultimately surfaced as Web Workers.

I wouldn’t use CSS in early Internet Explorer as a good example. There were quite a few cases where they shipped something prematurely based off an early draft, then the final spec. changed, making Internet Explorer incompatible with the standards and other browsers. That’s how the box model ended up the way that it did, for example. The draft was originally border-box behaviour, Internet Explorer implemented it too soon, then the specification changed to content-box behaviour and all the other browsers implemented it.

Yes. But bad box model is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- compared to where we would be if JSSS had become a de facto standard. It was a total mess, and an arrogant one at that.

I agree that JSSS was a poor choice, but Internet Explorer tried sneaking JScript into CSS in a few different ways, which wasn’t great for security or interoperability.

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