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Comment by bencollier49 | Hacker News Reader

Now if someone can figure out a way for Facebook to rewrite their site in pure WebAssembly, they won't have to worry about pesky programmers like you breaking people's habits.

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That's the most vexing thing I've read in a while. I manage Facebook addiction by not having the app installed on my phone and only using the browser(which works just fine). If they ever compiled their site to WebAssembly, that would be the end of them for me. The whole idea of WebAssembly is simultaneously awesome and scary.

Yeah, I think I only just cottoned on to the true appeal of WASM for certain sectors of the web industry.

I guess I'm new to the whole WebAssembly thing. Could you please elaborate more on that statement? If FB were to do that, how does WebAssembly stop you from doing what OP suggested?

You can't modify or block the newsfeed if they don't even have a DOM. Just feed raw pixels to the screen via webasm. And they have some incentive to do that because like many sites, they are in a constant war against scrapers and Adblock.

Theoretically, it doesn't. Practically, it would be a complete nightmare, as you'd have to decompile the source code into a high level language, then come up with some kind of (proper) hack, and run a code insertion tool in your browser to reinsert the changes. And they'd probably break any time Facebook altered their code at all, and moreover, FB could use a polymorphic compiler to make such things impossible. And finally, decompiling the program would probably be illegal if it was to circumvent the intended use of the site:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decompiler#Legality

I believe the assumption is that WebAssembly code wouldn't run on the typically browser API accessible DOM. Therefore chrome extensions, which operate on accessing markup via JS would now be rendered obsolete.

Or just add DRM. Worked for video.

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