Mozilla announced on its official blog yesterday a new feature that can be extremely welcome to enthusiasts of web apps and website developers. Version 52 of Firefox brings support WebAssembly, a technology developed by the company itself that, according to them, will bring a "revolution to the internet" by allowing the implementation of performance applications directly in the browser window.
WebAssembly allows complex applications, such as games, to run faster than ever in a browser. We hope that the technology will provide the development of applications that have historically been considered too complex to run on browsers such as 3D immersive games, computer aided design (CAD), video and image editing, and scientific visualization. We also expect developers to take advantage of WebAssembly to accelerate many web apps already existing.
Mozilla staff also shared a video of the technology in action surrender from Epic Zen Garden, Unreal Engine's demo tool, and the deal is really impressive:
Basically speaking, what WebAssembly provides is that the browser takes advantage of the computer's resources with a much smaller bottleneck than normal, because of the native support for programming languages like C and C ++. In other words, basically speaking, the browser can perform tasks with greater speed by not having to interpret the code and deciding how best to run it in the system, everything happens directly, without an “intermediary”, unlike applications in JavaScript that are the most common these days.
Firefox will be the first widely used browser to adopt WebAssembly support, but Apple, Google, Microsoft who have also contributed to its development have already promised to implement the technology in their browsers very soon which is very important for the standard to become widely used in the future. The Mozilla team also hopes that the technology will soon reach mobile devices. We can only wait.
In time, other new features in Firefox 52 include an automatic portal detector for connection to Wi-Fi networks (such as hotels or airports) that notifies the user of the existence of these barriers, as well as a new alert for potentially unsafe credential fields. (in the case of pages not encrypted with HTTPS). It can now be downloaded for macOS, Windows and Linux on this page.
(via MacRumors)
