It actually was Adobe. No really. Macromedia intended for Flash to be an animation tool with scripts. And it was pretty damn good at that. Now, some people used it as a weird multimedia type thing for their websites to make the websites real busy, but that wasn't what it was for. But when Adobe bought out Macromedia, they leaned fully into that multimedia web design thing, which caused the security issues to really show up.
look i understand that flash probably needed to be depreciated, but i kind of bristle at the degree to which adobe is trying to kill it. if i want to knowingly leave a security hole on my computer it should be my right to do so
Well it just had the same problem as Java applets. They didn't design it originally for client-side execution in a browser so there were holes. And then JavaScript blew up and it's gross and awful but was at least designed for web scripting. I'm surprised that WebAssembly still hasn't taken off much. The problem is JavaScript is still going to be required in browsers for the rest of eternity so adding WebAssembly doesn't really fix that, it seems more intended for browser stuff that has performance requirements. Maybe someone will make a standalone WebAssembly browser with a GUI system that sidesteps HTML and JavaScript altogether and the world can rejoice.
wasm has the potential to completely break the internet, every site a black box blob, executed in the sandbox of your browser and completely unmodifiable by extensions or developer tools
They already have a standard interface for using WASM in a desktop environment. I don't think it would be that much different to basically create a replacement for HTML and JavaScript that has some of the same features in terms of hyperlinking and accessibility and whatnot but as an API for WASM programs to use instead of WASM being hosted inside some kind of HTML/JS environment. So extensions could still hook into the "system calls" called by the sandbox environment. I think losing some of the configurability of the web in order to make web browsers easier to develop and maintain would be good.
Most websites are obfuscated and optimized anyways. More people would be able to create FOSS web browsers and other web tools if they only had to implement a WASM virtual machine and web interfaces instead of having to implement this massive HTML/JS API/renderer/VM. I doubt it will happen though because that wouldn't be in the interests of Google who basically dictates web standards, they want to continue their near monopoly on fancy web stuff and getting people to use their products.
I blame Brendan Eich, everyone who ever worked on ActiveX, and the entirety of Google.
We could have had simple, separate specifications for web documents and web applications that were easy to implement, performant, and built to purpose, but instead we have a gigantic mismash of everything over decades rolled into an impossible “standard”.
It actually was Adobe. No really. Macromedia intended for Flash to be an animation tool with scripts. And it was pretty damn good at that. Now, some people used it as a weird multimedia type thing for their websites to make the websites real busy, but that wasn't what it was for. But when Adobe bought out Macromedia, they leaned fully into that multimedia web design thing, which caused the security issues to really show up.
look i understand that flash probably needed to be depreciated, but i kind of bristle at the degree to which adobe is trying to kill it. if i want to knowingly leave a security hole on my computer it should be my right to do so
Well it just had the same problem as Java applets. They didn't design it originally for client-side execution in a browser so there were holes. And then JavaScript blew up and it's gross and awful but was at least designed for web scripting. I'm surprised that WebAssembly still hasn't taken off much. The problem is JavaScript is still going to be required in browsers for the rest of eternity so adding WebAssembly doesn't really fix that, it seems more intended for browser stuff that has performance requirements. Maybe someone will make a standalone WebAssembly browser with a GUI system that sidesteps HTML and JavaScript altogether and the world can rejoice.
wasm has the potential to completely break the internet, every site a black box blob, executed in the sandbox of your browser and completely unmodifiable by extensions or developer tools
They already have a standard interface for using WASM in a desktop environment. I don't think it would be that much different to basically create a replacement for HTML and JavaScript that has some of the same features in terms of hyperlinking and accessibility and whatnot but as an API for WASM programs to use instead of WASM being hosted inside some kind of HTML/JS environment. So extensions could still hook into the "system calls" called by the sandbox environment. I think losing some of the configurability of the web in order to make web browsers easier to develop and maintain would be good.
I just want everything to be FOSS all the time ;_;
Most websites are obfuscated and optimized anyways. More people would be able to create FOSS web browsers and other web tools if they only had to implement a WASM virtual machine and web interfaces instead of having to implement this massive HTML/JS API/renderer/VM. I doubt it will happen though because that wouldn't be in the interests of Google who basically dictates web standards, they want to continue their near monopoly on fancy web stuff and getting people to use their products.
I blame Brendan Eich, everyone who ever worked on ActiveX, and the entirety of Google.
We could have had simple, separate specifications for web documents and web applications that were easy to implement, performant, and built to purpose, but instead we have a gigantic mismash of everything over decades rolled into an impossible “standard”.