Another option would be feature-enabling plugins, for example a plugin that enables WebRTC developed by some random company. I still don't see how it won't be massively worse than browser security.
But you had the option! Want your computer to the unsafe man-child playgroud? go ahead, install flash. Want something serious for work, don't touch it.
But the advertisement industry had their way and apple and microsoft started to include flash by default. Do you think Google fought flash because they care about you? heh. Google helped kill flash because it gave an edge to microsoft since their ad network at the time was text only and microsoft et al were making bank on swf banners.
anyway, you had the option! it was a plugin, not the browser. Instead of a better plugin, you killed the radio star, took over w3C so that feature for your ad network would be part of the standard.
Now chrome is worse than flash. Features like Federated Learning of Cohorts will be shoved down your throat like or not and it won't even allow you to play web games or something FUN.
very little of this submitted screed touches upon this area, but to me the anti-webassembly remarks feel very close fit to anti-flash remarks. js has gotten bad, but I continue to think eventually we'll see better actors (especially with an arisal of custom elements). webassembly makes me think the web will get anti-web anti-understandable, anti-user as a medium increasingly for the next 50 years probably, most of my remaining life. doing good & being a respectful medium will be just as possible as without webassembly, but there will be so much energy & focus on an industrialized non-user non-acessible non-user-agency dark world shadow-nightmare hell-web because of webhassembly, that will absolutely dominate & be enticing to so so so wide a range of the alpha geeks... while users lose & lose & lose.
flash 2.0 is coming & it will be cheered & celebrated & far far worse for users than the flash we have finally killed.
I was pretty young, but I'm pretty sure I remember opening someone else's swf file in a decompiler in middle school. It was a little weird but I was able to make the changes I wanted.
How editable is WASM code, really?
It's not as much how you can hack around it but more about open-by-default and open-by-design.
Unfortunately, there are very practical performance reasons to send information in a "compiled," less-editable format. Which is why even static sites nowadays typically use some type of build system.
I do wonder if with the 'somewhat standard' min.map files that can point out what the rendered versions relate to in the 'source' versions could somehow be enforced. That way you can still use the compact version first and if you do want to see what's happening you can just get the map and the source and explore.
Wasm code is editable via the very very good dev tools systems we have today, mostly dictated via the Chrome DevTools protocol which even Mozilla largely harkens to & which is being semi-standardized through wicg[1]. Still fairly early days but support is not bad! But... it's a monumentally harder challenge imo than JS. There are source maps, so if the site is nice, you can see what the authored uncompiled code was, but there's no facility to author in that language & recompile your changes via the debugger. And I fear few sites will post the source maps to make webassembly comprehendible. Few sites have morals, ethics, or respect for the web as a medium: they see it as a platform for them alone to dictate to you the user what you get. This, to me, is the sad end Flash had forced upon us, that the web was so much better than.
It wasn't enabled everywhere by default and the majority of sites didn't assume you had it, unless it was something that genuinely needed it (like, habbo hotel, or youtube back in the day) it often never got enabled, meaning people couldn't use it for tracking me, or eating up all my local resources.
That's a freedom we've lost, disabling javascript just breaks everything.
Though webgl continues to be a toggle, though enabled by default.