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Comment by dkersten | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion it’s been a long time since direct access to Javascript has been useful. Yes you can unminify javascript but it’s still more work than most people will go through (especially if the code was generated by a compile to javascript language)so for most people things aren’t really changing that much

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I don't even think source code access is the most important part of the browser's dev console. Consider the network tab instead, being able to see exactly where your bandwidth is being spent and why.

This to me makes the browser vastly preferable to native apps. I didn't realize that the desktop app I use to easily translate languages[0] sends every keystroke to Google Analytics until I had to bother installing a proxy. Meanwhile this analysis is just an Opn-Cmd-I away in the browser.

[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/translate-tab/id458887729

Totally agreed -- and I don't think WASM will change any of that.

The good parts of the web in terms of debugging is the separation of concerns -- having separate interfaces for CSS, HTML, network requests, and the DOM, and having each of those interfaces be relatively inspectable.

I am a little worried about frameworks that target WASM spitting everything onto a Canvas, bypassing HTML and CSS (coughQt*cought). That would be a substantial loss for the Open web. But I don't lose any sleep over the idea of replacing Javascript.

Direct access to Javascript is useful on a daily basis for those concerned with a number of security threats.

Yes, it is a ton of work to step through and understand minified and obfuscated code, but it is a skill that many people learn and do if there is motivation. On your second point, I think the key is that the people who do have a reason to detangle the logic of minified JS can be very impactful. I consider open viewing of Javascript as similar to noncompetes in California. It allows one to view competitors source code (if you have the motivation to work for it), which ultimately allows you to learn from and adapt their best practices. Yes, this can have negative effects, but it also may allow for a smaller company to leapfrog a larger incumbent who is too lazy to do some part of their processing server side. I could probably learn a lot about how to write (and block!) analytics tracking by reviewing the Google analytics javascript source code for example.

(Disclaimer: I've never looked at Google's analytics .js files and that may not be possible for some technical reason unknown to me)

Reading webassembly is not that difficult.

The main challenge is that variable and function names are not available, but minified js is no better in that regard.

> I think the key is that the people who do have a reason to detangle the logic of minified JS can be very impactful.

You don’t need javascript for this. People reverse engineer native binaries all the time. Reversing wasm isn’t much more difficult than minified javascript as my sibling commenter states.

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