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hollerithHNSource authorMar 30, 2026

Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

In summary, site owners already have too much control over my experience (relative to me and …

… In summary, site owners already have too much control over my experience (relative to me and authors of software such as a browser extension acting on my behalf), and wasm would give them even more control. It would be one thing if I used the web mainly to run sophisticated applications. I do not: I use it mainly to find simple data resources, mostly text and URLs, written by ordinary people such as yourself. When anyone anywhere wants to get some information out to the world and consider how best to do that, 99% percent of the time, the first thought that comes to mind is to put some text or maybe a video or some other kind of data on the web . I see sentiments like the one you expressed just now as interfering with the flow of this text or other kind of data to me -- by making the process more complicated, less customizable by the user and giving "middlemen" like advertiser more ways to profit from this flow. …

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apatheticonionHNMar 30, 2026

This is the part about the "wasm won't replace JavaScript" argument I see being slept on and why I am so disheartened about how practically no progress has been made on it. Most trivial apps don't need to be optimized, and for them, JavaScript is fine. But for complex interactive web applications - it really fuggin matters. Think; - vscode - facebook - jira - linkedin - reddit There's no reason these applications should be slow, single threaded, and consume gigabytes of memory - but that's a limitation of the technology. I know first hand that Atlassian has spent millions of dollars building bundlers in different forms just to save a few milliseconds of load time. Just let me write the front end in Rust and if the browser detects that no JavaScript is running - don't start a JavaScript engine. While you're at it, improve the SharedWorker story so I can effectively share data between tabs…

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MintPawHNMar 30, 2026

> The way it is now, I can modify web sites using extensions This isn't related too directly to WASM, what you want is DOM rendering only, you would theoretically reject canvas and WebGL rendering I imagine. But you could create DOM nodes with WASM. The only difference is that WASM is not as easy to decompile, but I can't imagine you're really unminifiying and patching Javascript are you?

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apatheticonionHNMar 30, 2026

1) Wasm wouldn't prevent you from running those client scripts (e.g. remove fixed elements). That would still just be a script that modifies the DOM from an extension after the page is rendered/dom mutations occur. 2) wasm makes serving static content practical as server side rendering is economical. My previous employer, for instance, spends tens of millions of dollars every year running SSR servers - almost all of that would be eliminated if the backend could just run the client as wasm. 3) Scrapers (think puppeteer) would be faster and more resource efficient because they wouldn't need to start a JavaScript runtime to load a page. 4) You don't use Electron apps? 5) You may not, but everyone else uses rich interactive web applications. Think of the energy usage and cost savings there would be to the world.

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