Chrome and WebAssembly .....

[J65nko]

Last Friday I wanted to do a OS upgrade for daemonforums. I could not because Hetzner, our hosting provider, put some anti-robot protection in place (simplified webpage):

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I did a tcpdump but could not find anything. With the chrome web developer tool I found that the page tried to load a WebAssembly thingy:

Uncaught ReferenceError: WebAssembly is not defined

Googling showed that on OpenBSD WebAssembly has been disabled ......
Nothing about this in the man page and also not in the pkg readme.

The following script starts chrome with WebAssembly enabled:

#!/bin/sh

# Run chrome with WebAssembly enabled .....

env ENABLE_WASM=1 chrome --enable-wasm &

With that I could login to my Hetzner cloud console, but then it was too late to do the planned system upgrade ,,,,,,,,,

[jggimi]

Looking at the commit log for ports/www/chromium/Makefile, I can see that WebAssembly was disabled by default in April, 2019, "because it is a disaster," and in July, 2020, the ENABLE_WASM environment variable was tested to see if it was set, and provisioning WebAssembly if it was. This change was due to Zoom being dependent upon WebAssembly.

Since you've noticed this lack of WebAssembly documentation, and as it caused you some grief, you might want to consider proposing a patch to ports/www/chromium/pkg/README.