14 DAY TRIAL // Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla revealed today that they've added experimental support for the WebAssembly file format in their bleeding-edge browser versions.
WebAssembly was announced last June, as a joint research effort under the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) stewardship to develop a binary file format for Web applications.
Initial members of this W3C working group included Mozilla, Microsoft, Google and Apple, and they set out to develop a new low-level binary compiled format and a new scripting language, that would fill in the holes that JavaScript was missing.
The standard is an attempt to provide a more efficient way of delivering content over the Internet, cutting down file size, but also improving in-browser performance by offering an assembly language for the Web.
The WebAssembly file format and adjacent scripting language will try to provide a near-perfect correlation between the actual scripting language and the machine (binary) code that runs on the underlying architecture (CPU), which should technically reduce some of the lag we see today at page loads, and when interacting with Web content.
Apple is behind schedule, will also ship WebAssembly support with Safari
Today, the fruits of this labor are coming forward, and during the day, Google, then Microsoft, and then Mozilla, have announced that they've added initial support for WebAssembly files in their browsers, more specifically in the latest versions of Google Canary, Firefox Nightly Edition, and Edge's preview builds.
Apple didn't announce anything official, but the other three browser makers mentioned that an upcoming Safari version would have WebAssembly support included as well.
Right now the new WebAssembly standard is not yet finished, but to showcase its advantages, a demo site was provided (see video below) where users can play a port of Unity’s Angry Bots sci-fi shooter, not in Flash or JavaScript, but delivered via WebAssembly.
As Mozilla explains, the current progress on WebAssembly includes a description and rationale of the initial feature set, a roadmap of planned future features, a specification and reference interpreter, a first draft of the binary format, and about 13,000 lines of tests.
