alt Hacker NewsI have every copy of Firefox here configured with webassembly disabled...because I don't tend to do what Webassembly was designed for, i.e. online games, video/audio editing, emulation, etc. [1] and because I dislike things running in the background without my knowledge.
So this is going to be interesting.
My plea (in a small voice) to the OP: just as many sites still do for JavaScript, please add a "This captcha required Webassembly to continue" message to your code when Webassembly is disabled. And, incidentally, for smaller platforms/browsers that don't offer a Webassembly engine at all.
Replies
> because I dislike things running in the background without my knowledge
Point of order: WASM doesn't let things run in the background. To do that you need WebWorkers (a javascript feature, not WASM-specific).
It's amusing (although disheartening to me as someone who builds online games) that wasm is now being treated like a flash plugin by sysadmins. You're not entirely wrong, but it's just funny to me that we took a full ten years to get back to roughly the same place. Now with Ruffle running Flash in wasm, no less! We build shit that doesn't work in the DOM, search engines hate it, walled gardens try to block it, admins fear it, they shut it down and the whole thing starts over.
I don't mean to be rude, but please search "wasm2js" in the article.
I really don't see why you'd disable WebAssembly and allow JavaScript instead. Expecting developers to make a fallback for a baseline-supported feature for any reason but backwards compatibility with runtimes that do not so support WASM is extremely silly.
"I disable things and expect others to do things for me, in their own time, without being paid, to bring solutions to my paranoia"
You do see how selfish it is, right? While the author did introduce such a solution, it's such a massive waste of time.
The second half of this post chronicles the author's Herculean efforts to make everything work well in the cases you describe.
> One of the big things that blocked this shipping for so long was not having an escape hatch of some kind to allow clients that disable WebAssembly by policy to get through the gate. [...] This combination of factors means that there would need to be another implementation of the proof of work code in JavaScript that would actually execute the number crunching.