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Comment by bickfordb | Hacker News Reader

The definition of a web browser is enormous now. Even though Apple has massive resources, is it really fair to rant against them for not implementing every possible specification, five years old or not?

If web assembly is supposedly as fast as C, why can't we have web browsers with a smaller built-in feature set and implement new specifications as libraries?

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While web assembly may give us performance, it doesn't give us access to new platform API. Web assembly can in no way replace Service Worker, IndexedDB or Web Manifests.

It also won't help with Web Components unless you're aming for a Web where we just draw on a big canvas.

I want a web where we just draw on a big canvas. That's a pretty simple API for implementers to get right. Then we could move the scene graph (DOM) and it's rendering engine entirely into the application language where it could be more readily hot-fixed. It'd be like PDFJS but for your whole fucking web browser.

Note that PDFJS still creates a DOM, in order to support little things like selection, accessibility, etc.

Have you looked into the Famo.us project? It's not my cup of tea in terms of implementation, but it sounds like exactly what you're looking for. Alternatively, what's keeping you from just using <canvas>?

That was the idea behind ActiveX. Instead of continuing development on the browser, people could just write an ActiveX component. Or A Java Applet.

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