Honestly Google's probably almost as guilty - Native Client was a great idea and sidestepped basically all the issues we are having now, but they killed it in favour of 'standard' APIs, like Wasm that basically barely work for their intended purposes
Add Mozzilla to the mix, for not wanting to adopt PNaCL, coming up with asm.js, and for what.
Firefox is almost irrelevant now, and Google is calling all the shots anyway.
Without Safari's relevance on mobile, the Web would have long turned into ChromeOS everywhere by now.
> Add Mozzilla to the mix, for not wanting to adopt PNaCl.
Mozilla wasn't in any position to command the market, even at the time PNaCl was created. PNaCl failed on its own demerits.
> Firefox is almost irrelevant now
Firefox has been irrelevant because it doesn't have the trillion dollar budget of Apple and Google, nor the vendor lock-in, and with that no reach which would enable it to steer web the way it deems fit. It has nothing to do with asm.js
Not at all, had Mozilla adopted PNaCL instead of coming up with asm.js, and WebAssembly would never come up, delaying everything for a decade.
Here is a memory refresher from 2011,
"Mozilla's Rejection of NativeClient Hurts the Open Web"
https://chadaustin.me/2011/01/mozillas-rejection-of-nativecl...
The argument against NaCL was that it was the browser API, PPAPI, was poorly documented and exposing implementation details of Blink/Chromium and thus very difficult to implement in a non-Chromium browser, so it's no surprise that Mozilla, Apple, and Opera were unenthused.
> Honestly Google's probably almost as guilty - Native Client was a great idea and sidestepped basically all the issues
NaCl failed on its own.
A) Wasn't backwards compatible
B) Spec was - look at the Chrome source
C) No one other than Google wanted it
D) It was essentially ActiveX Google (yeah, ActiveX had some nifty ideas and they still persist to this day)
PNaCL specification documents.
https://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/pnacl/
Naturally after a decade not all links are working.
Nah, Native Client had a lot of its own problems. Except for pthreads-style multithreading, PNaCl couldn't even compete with asm.js, and Spectre/Meltdown would be just as catastrophic for PNaCl as it was for SharedArrayBuffer.