afterword

When we first started working on WebAssembly in Firefox, along with our colleagues in Chrome, Safari, and Edge, we were, as Dan mentioned at the beginning of this book, primarily interested in providing a safe, portable, standards-based alternative to native browser NPAPI, ActiveX, and PPAPI plugins. Already this was a challenging goal for both technical and browser-political reasons—several attempts in this direction had already been made, and all had failed to achieve cross-browser adoption. Fortunately, with Emscripten and asm.js already being used in production, we had a nice, focused goal for our initial release: provide something functionally equivalent but more efficient and less weird than asm.js that existing Emscripten users could target by simply flipping a flag.