And done natively with no need for the plugin mess and security holes of Flash. The key would be navigating the feature creep that led to the bulk and security holes of Flash.
Unity already has the bulk, but the security holes shouldn't be as big of an issue given that it's "just a website" and runs in the browser sandbox.
Seems like they could make a whole new market though. It's more likely that browser support is being held back from Safari/Chrome to keep money flowing to app stores
There's nothing inherently large about WebAssembly, it's just that most practical wasm demos bundle emscripten (essentially an entire OS's standard library) or another very heavy layer in order to interop between the JS and WASM world.
As a bit of an experiment to see how small wasm could practically be with a minimal interop layer, I built this little project - the web demo is 90KB of JS + 70KB of wasm:
https://github.com/jordwest/cavernos
It was heavily inspired by this article which manages even smaller builds:
http://cliffle.com/blog/bare-metal-wasm/
There's a lot of room for improvement in terms of size optimisation in most projects, but it's still early days and for now most of them just bundle an OS compatibility layer to get things working quickly.
Once it loads though wow, the graphics are great, nice little physics effects. Wonder how many online games are like this. Light source/shadow also cool.
On subsequent loads it's fast like it's near 80-90% already.
in terms of gaming yeah this is a mid-tier computer
I want to get a 3090FE just because, but I'm not dropping $4K on that
Yeah I know for dev work can scale down eg. pi zero on a keychain and use cloud resources.
edit The bottleneck is most likely distance too server and RTT