w3c / w3c/webextensions

Considerations for WebAssembly runtime

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#39 8 comments 10 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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enhancement spec clarification topic: csp
Dominant language
Bikeshed
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711
Forks
95
Avg merge
10d 11h
Merged PRs (30d)
2

Description

Web development is no longer just dominated by JavaScript with the emergence of more WebAssembly runtime and framework.

There are certain limitations when it comes to using WebAssembly to develop an extension, such as longer load time and bigger package size.

With this in mind, decisions such as deprecating persistent background in favour of service worker needs to be reconsidered because if the extension has a fresh start for every event, we will face similar issue of having "cold start" in serverless applications. I have been using Blazor to develop extensions and generally the pages take about 3 seconds to startup. I haven't been developing more advanced scenarios so that is all I can think of so far.

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First steps

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  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Issue #39 discusses WebAssembly runtime limitations for extensions, including startup time and package size, but names no files, tests, or implementation entry point. Read the discussion and evaluate the persistent-background and service-worker trade-offs; no concrete completion criteria are defined yet.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
wasm
Domain
performance, web-dev
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
20/100

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