The state of the web

Bootstrapping a multiplayer experience on the web is as easy as sharing a link.

To the extent that the web has been difficult to kill, it is because it is evolvable. The web started as a way for scientists to share papers, and then evolved into new niches, including e-commerce, wikis, flash games, blogs, web apps, streaming video, social media, office suites, chat apps, design tools... It keeps finding new fits, and changing i... See more

The browser has historically been a thick platform for thin apps. The browser engine does most of the heavy lifting. It gives you a standard interaction model, standard affordances, standard accessibility features, standard tags, standard scripting environment. Things like Google can be built on top of the open web because everything is written wit... See more

WebAssembly, on the other hand, is a thin platform, for thick apps. WASM runs very low-level bytecode, and that’s about it. This gives the developer incredible power, but at a cost. You have to build nearly everything from scratch.

The web is open-ended, and continues to produce plot twists. WebAssembly is one of these. It is a universal bytecode runtime, designed to run fast low-level code in a sandbox. Why does this matter?