Surprise! Mozilla can produce near-native performance on the Web

We put Mozilla's JavaScript subset—asm.js—to the test.

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styron[/url]":rlwuglk6]

Faramir[/url]":rlwuglk6]I don't understand why people seem to think that every sort of program should run in a browser.

Triple A video games, scientific computing programs, and computer assisted design programs seem particularly ill suited to a web browser strait jacket, that nonetheless people are enthusiastically working on.

The number one answer seems to be that people trust the browsers' sandboxes which a) seems unwarranted and b) seems like overkill for the problem of untrusted code.

10 yrs ago I would wonder why people would want to stream music or video instead of downloading it and playing it locally.

That way they could play it again and again without wasting network traffic/bandwidth and they wouldn't have to put up with excessive compression, buffering headaches, broken connections etc.

Now I hardly care, and streaming has some advantages around multiple devices and not having to maintain media libraries etc.

Apps moving to browsers is the same kind of progression. Yes it kind of sucks at the moment (especially for complex apps), but year by year it sucks less, and the advantages around not having to maintain software start becoming more compelling.

It isn't about right now - it's about 5-10yrs time.

Local playback is still better than streaming. All youtube videos play better when downloaded locally. It lets me use the awesome feature of vlc to speed up the playback to reduce my viewing time by one half.

Network is still an issue; most of all its reliability and that will always be inferior to local playback.

The problem is not in the concept of local playback. The problem is in lack of maturity in software that should treat all playbacks as local and when it is not locally available, have enough information to fetch it from a resource online.