this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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I love seeing webassembly getting traction because it enable cool stuff never thought possible before running in web browsers. But webassembly is a blackbox that can't be tinkered with by end users. I dread the day webassembly become so widely used that average websites run under webassembly because that would be the end of blocking ads or tweaking websites behavior with greasemonkey scripts.
I don't think adblockers rely on interpreting JavaScript, I think they would still work even if a site used WebAssembly.
Source: I can assure you every single ad-funded website would be doing this if that was the case.
ublock origin won't help you blocking the ad elements if the entire website ui is rendered in a canvas (already starting to happen thanks to some frameworks like flutter) and can't block the ad logic if it bundled in the wasm along with the rest of the app. It might still able to block the requests, but they're starting to serve the ads from the same domain that serves the website so it can't be blocked without breaking the website itself, and might begin to serve those over websocket so adblockers can't block it by url path. With javascript, an ad blocker might still be able to monkey patch the ad logic on runtime to break it, but with black box like wasm I'm not sure if such thing is possible.
Once tooling and frameworks make it easier for average webdevs to use webasm, I'm sure ad companies will begin to offer it in their ads sdk. Thankfully most websites with ads are still care about SEO so at the very least we can be sure it won't happen anytime soon, unless something changes in how google works that could enable this.
That sounds like an accessibility nightmare.
Have you tried not being disabled?
Flutter devs actually defended this approach, saying the web in general is moving to this direction. I think they've mellowed out somewhat and released html renderer support, though it's still default to canvas for desktop web browsers.