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Every day we get closer to reinventing the Java applet.

Again.

WebAssembly is explicitly a new native plugin like API but cross browser, standardized , and with lessons learned for complexity and security.

You can see it skimming the WebAssembly high level design goals: https://webassembly.org/docs/high-level-goals/. Many of them directly address limitations of past web content plugin systems.

Last time I looked, you still can't touch the DOM without a JavaScript shim. You can't use it to write "normal" client-side web applications without hacks and workarounds.

IOW, it's a VM-style environment that pretty much lives on its own and completely ignores the elephant in the room: that it's running inside a browser that deals predominantly in HTML and CSS.

Just like Java Applets, Flash, ...

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