If we want to tackle black boxes, the problem isn't so much WebAssembly as it is Canvas itself. As to whether the benefits of that outway the problems it introduces... eh, people can decide that for themselves.
Not to diminish what you're saying because I agree with you, but I'm less upset about malicious site operators (they could always have been doing this even before WebASM) and more concerned about the beginner (or advanced) programmer that's looking at this thinking, "sweet, I can write my app in Qt, hit an export button, and everything will magically just be fine."
Honestly, I'm not even upset at that developer - they should be able to just hit a button and have it magically work.
I'm upset that Qt isn't rendering any of their stuff to the DOM. CSS is good enough to handle this nowadays, it can't possibly be easier to write their own rendering engine from scratch than it would be to just use the tools that are already built into every browser.
They should be using Canvas only as a fallback when nothing else will work.
It probably is easier to write their own rendering engine because, sadly, they've already have done it - for quite some time now, instead of using any native drawing functionality Qt renders the entire window contents in a pixel buffer and dumps that to a native toplevel window (FWIW GTK+ 3 and later do the same thing). In this case all they have to do is dump the pixel buffer to the canvas instead.
If the web had decent components for apps with a consistent look, behavior and data model across browsers, perhaps this is how things could be. Fact is, after 38 (!) years HTML does not have a data list component that works well (what I mean is [1], something that I could put 10.000+ items in and expect to work. Something useful). I don't know about you but I'm not even 38 years old, so given that people are starting talking to me about midlife crisis, implying I'm about halfway to death by natural causes, I think at this point I should conclude I will be dead before the web will have basic usable working components.
Also I hate the totally inconsistent look of the components we do have. I mean anything I make on linux or windows is close to intolerable on mac. Which is, of course, why all designers totally avoid them and instead just totally redesign everything from scrollbars to buttons.
The web is ... decent ... for what are essentially slide handouts ("websites"). Let's start making some real applications now.
> it can't possibly be easier to write their own rendering engine from scratch
Did you know that the original rendering engine of webkit & blink, khtml, was Qt's ? Besides, the platform abstraction that allows to use Qt on top of WASM is less than 3k lines of code - everything else is the same whether you're on windows, mac, whatever.
Not to diminish what you're saying because I agree with you, but I'm less upset about malicious site operators (they could always have been doing this even before WebASM) and more concerned about the beginner (or advanced) programmer that's looking at this thinking, "sweet, I can write my app in Qt, hit an export button, and everything will magically just be fine."
Honestly, I'm not even upset at that developer - they should be able to just hit a button and have it magically work.
I'm upset that Qt isn't rendering any of their stuff to the DOM. CSS is good enough to handle this nowadays, it can't possibly be easier to write their own rendering engine from scratch than it would be to just use the tools that are already built into every browser.
They should be using Canvas only as a fallback when nothing else will work.