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All Major Browsers Now Support WebAssembly (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader writes: "It took only two years for all browser vendors to get on the same page regarding the new WebAssembly standard, and as of October 2017, all major browsers support it," reports Bleeping Computer. Project spearheads Firefox and Chrome were the first major browsers to graduate WebAssembly from preview versions to their respective stable branches over the summer. The second wave followed in the following weeks when Chromium-based browsers like Opera and Vivaldi also rolled out the feature as soon as it was added to the Chromium stable version. The last ones to ship WebAssembly in the stable branches were Apple in Safari 11.0 and Microsoft in Microsoft Edge (EdgeHTML 16), which is the version that shipped with the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. Both were released last month. WebAssembly, or wasm, is a bytecode format for the web, allowing developers to send JavaScript code to browsers in smaller sizes, but also to compile from C/C++/Rust to wasm directly.
Better to get content from the source. BleepingComputer appears to just read Mozilla blogs and repackage them as its own. Here's the original Mozilla blog post.
Firefox's 2% or 3% of the market doesn't matter at all.
Firefox is currently the 3rd most popular, with 13% market share. source.
In general, yes you can. One important thing to keep in mind is that not all libraries are available in wasm. Obviously win32 won't work, and most C++ GUI toolkits have not been posted to render to a HTML 5 canvas yet.
Another big hole IMHO is there is no native support for garbage collected languages yet. The thing that excites me the most about this is once GC is enabled we could potentially see a Python implementation that runs in the browser (without having to recompile CPython to wasm, which would be huge and slow.) You could also do stuff like compile Java/C#/Adobe Flash directly to wasm and completely eliminate the terrible Flash/Silverlight/Java plugins.
Already about 1/2 of web pages I can only get to work by using "view source" and clipping out links from the source
Whatever possible damage you think javascript can cause you is tiny compared to your current nightmarish internet experience. Maybe it's time to move on.
lucm, indeed.
I have a colleague working on formal verification of WebAssembly. Part of this has involved fuzzing various WebAssembly implementations. There are a lot of bugs in all of them, though Edge is by far the worst (reproduceable crashes are hard, because it crashes randomly on most of his test inputs, but at different points).
It's also a pretty horrible design. It's replaced HSAIL as my go-to example for how not to design a good IR.
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Firefox about:config, set:
javascript.options.wasm = false
javascript.options.asmjs = false