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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

I want to be able to interact with synths over MIDI in the browser

Help me understand why this is. Is it because there aren't native programs for the platform you're using? Is it to allow plug-ins or other abilities that wouldn't otherwise be available? Is it so that you can sync up with other musicians and play together in a way that wouldn't be possible without a browser?

choose a browser that doesn't implement those things.

The way feature creep have been going lately, in about six months that will mean Lynx.

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Because it's really cool to try out experimental instruments other poeple have made by simply opening a webpage, without having to execute untrusted native code that could have bad consequences.

AKA laziness. yes, lets please bloat of the scope of browsers until they are no longer recognizable, so that you dont have to install some software.

You oversaw the untrusted part, this is the only reason I prefer web over native really. If there was a way to run native apps with that level of isolation, I would prefer native.

Snap, Flatpack, iOS sandbox, Android sandbox, UWP/Windows sandbox,...

Unfortunately, none of those are cross-platform... Closest we get to something similar to the web is either the JVM or APE (Actually Portable Executable) but then those are generally not as isolated as the alternatives you mentioned, sadly.

Or CLR, or now the fashionable WebAssembly.

Plus, plenty of languages have cross-platform runtimes and libraries, so not a big issue, not everything needs to be JavaScript.

Instead, you're executing untrusted browser code, which is hardly better.

I'm interested if this is true. It seems like the js sandbox is pretty well implemented now in most cases. Webgl had some problems at first leaking host data, but the willingness to sacrifice performance for security seems pretty ingrained in these consortiums?

I don't understand how you can possibly say this with a straight face.

> Help me understand why this is. Is it because there aren't native programs for the platform you're using?

Easier to create, easier to share and run. Mainly easier to create because the ones I'm sharing small MIDI sequencer experiments with are also web developers, so we just send each other links where we can run stuff direction from, and we can help each other out as we all use the same technology. Really easy to understand what the other is doing too, as you just open up the source of the page and that's it.

I've played around with other languages/runtimes for doing the same thing, but nothing is as fast to implement as with JavaScript, probably mostly due to familiarity.

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