Basically 10 years wasting time to come full circle.
https://leaningtech.com/cheerpj
https://leaningtech.com/cheerpx-for-flash/
All of the three major ones are now back, but it is ok, WASM is great!
It's just a choice this framework made. I bet there are actually some real advantages to it, but also disadvantages. I very very much like the customizability of the web, so I'd be very surprised if the advantages would outweigh the problems.
In short, I don't think it's really the same as Flash.
Practically, it's mostly used for tracking and making users' machines execute even more inscrutable code. IMO, if you need wasm for |"normal" pages and apps, you're doing something wrong. There are notable exceptions (say machine emulators, maybe 3d games and such), but they are spread far between most pages.
For now. Flash was also fine in the early days.
https://dazeinfo.com/2019/11/08/number-of-adobe-employees-wo...
if headcount was any way to measure success, then the killing of Flash did Adobe the world of good.
edit : not corollary, but the capacity to manage Flash security might have arrived too late, if I recall that late 2000s sudden Acrobat hegemony that was so absolute a stranglehold on corporate document cultural defaults they were uncaring about opt out only browser extension auto installation and more dark patterns than I care to remember. Unless the dark patterns secured that growth. Ugh. One of the primary factors in my purchase of a top model iPhone for my first Apple product that wasn't Snow White era was the ability to print to PDF (edit removed anecdote accidentally aggregated)
