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Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

The more imminent concern is that publishers are beginning to bundle browser runtimes completely replacing native browser functionality along with its established privacy and fair use expectations. Say hello to unskippable interstitials, unblockable analytics and targeted advertising, content that can't be linked, saved/archived, mirrored, cached, shared, translated or made otherwise accessible.

Developers mostly discuss JavaScript shortcomings and new possibilities offered by WebAss, but seem otherwise happy to completely throw the fundamental architecture of the web under the bus.

Technically, what WebAss can do has since long been possible with native applications; the only thing added here are new software licensing models, eg. pay-per-use, but mostly tracking/ad-financed.

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I have the same worry. Page downloads content as some encrypted binary blob, displays it using <canvas>, impossible to block advertising or copy text.

However, at the end of the day, content providers have to make their content available in plain HTML format in order for search engines to index it. If they did the above without offering a plain HTML alternative, they'd lose traffic from search engines. But, if they are offering that format to search engines, they have to offer it to us too.

(Okay, they could lock it down so the plain HTML is only available if User-Agent = Googlebot/Bingbot/etc and source IP is coming from Google/Bing/etc network. But, will the search engines let them get away with that? I would hope Google would refuse to index it on the grounds that their crawler is getting something very different from what the real user sees, but I guess that's their decision.)

You can already do all this. In practice, I've never seen a site render its text and ads to a canvas to make things difficult for me.

IMO, the bigger obstacle to "content that can't be linked, saved/archived, mirrored, cached, shared, translated or made otherwise accessible" is the "fundamental architecture of the web": HTTP. You can't link it (who knows if the person who clicks the link will get the same page?), you can't cache it (who knows when to invalidate it?), you can't mirror it (who can enumerate the dependencies?), and so on. Something like IPFS would fix these things (and should fix these things). But in practice, a fairly cacheable, linkable, mirrorable, sharable web has been built on HTTP and I expect nothing much will change when wasm is thrown into the big vat of web technologies too.

Google (for years now) have been indexing "apps" ie. they execute code found in web pages and index the generated DOM (within bounds and with additional heuristics, obviously). In fact, not deepening Google's search monopoly is another excellent reason not to go all-in on the procedural web.

Mind you, I have nothing against Google nor ads in general (but I do have an issue with tracking, even though it has legitimate uses).

This isn't a dystopian future we can avoid, it is a dystopian present that already happened and we are stuck with it.

Almost every page needs JS to use. Almost all JS is thoroughly munged beyond readability. It's normal for even page navigation (surely a browser function) to be handled in JS, and for resource loading (again a browser function) to be done through JS making AJAX requests to URLs generated deep in a minified blob. The accessibility nightmare is real.

Ads are common as ever and adblocking is an arms race never won. DRM has been here for years, and HBO isn't putting .mp4s on an FTP server any time soon. YouTube is almost unwatchably saturated with ads and is run by Google, the search and analytics company. Targeted advertising and analytics are a bell that can't be un-rung.

The web you are trying to save became a victim of its own success, somewhere around when everyone decided it was going to be HTTP and HTML instead of gopher, the browser wars started and AOL users started to flood USENET.

"Companies are doing shitty things with browsers nowadays. Instead of shaming them and calling them out on it, lets just create a system that shows us how best to grab our ankles"

This is going to ruin so much about the web, and this 'lets just give up' attitude is one of the reasons why

>Ads are common as ever and adblocking is an arms race never won.

What are you talking about? I think I saw 2-3 ads top through all my browsing for the last year. The arms race is won by the adblocker. There was a slight upset when adblock detectors appeared, but Anti-Adblock killer took care of them.

Or... you could continue avoiding websites that do what you deem unacceptable things. I won't visit a Forbes website intentionally - I have no intention of supporting a site that wants to throw ads quite that blatantly in my face. There'll always be a very large amount of sites that behave respectably.

What sites do you frequent? Almost every site is infested with advertising.

Sounds like flash based sites. Nothing really new. WebAssembly means I can use a safe language like Rust, and deliver to any platform with zero install pain for the user.

If publishers are replacing browser functionality, it's probably because the current way to reach browser functionality from wasm is bad/slow. See the second stick man graphic here:

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/02/where-is-webassembly-now-a...

That will also put a barrier in front of the current practice of borrowing code and techniques from other sites. How much of that goes on today is pretty opaque, so I'm not sure what effect it would have.

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