The API wars – 16 years later

(Incidentally, got this from my RSS reader, which is Nextcloud News).

That might be a way out. I am afraid moving the browser to being contained inside a WASM runtime would mean losing a lot of optimizations, things like zero-copy video playback, HW-accelerated SVG rendering, etc. One would still need to provide a rather large API to interact with the system. And it would definitely make it a lot harder to get started with web development if you can't just show the source of the page and change it. Not sure what Richard Stallman would say either (though I have a good idea given librejs).

Accessibility would also likely take a step back (though sign me up if you end up providing CLI interfaces to your WASM webapps). In many ways, this would be very similar to the Flash era of the web.

A lot of tradeoffs to navigate, but this isn't a bad idea.