Despite all the bending over backwards to keep the fruit company on board with WebGPU, they still haven't actually shipped their Metal backend in Safari over a year after Chrome managed to ship DirectX, Metal and Vulkan backends simultaneously. Mozilla hasn't shipped WebGPU either but their resources can hardly be compared to Apples.
Honestly Google's probably almost as guilty - Native Client was a great idea and sidestepped basically all the issues we are having now, but they killed it in favour of 'standard' APIs, like Wasm that basically barely work for their intended purposes
Nah, Native Client had a lot of its own problems. Except for pthreads-style multithreading, PNaCl couldn't even compete with asm.js, and Spectre/Meltdown would be just as catastrophic for PNaCl as it was for SharedArrayBuffer.
> Add Mozzilla to the mix, for not wanting to adopt PNaCl.
Mozilla wasn't in any position to command the market, even at the time PNaCl was created. PNaCl failed on its own demerits.
> Firefox is almost irrelevant now
Firefox has been irrelevant because it doesn't have the trillion dollar budget of Apple and Google, nor the vendor lock-in, and with that no reach which would enable it to steer web the way it deems fit. It has nothing to do with asm.js
The argument against NaCL was that it was the browser API, PPAPI, was poorly documented and exposing implementation details of Blink/Chromium and thus very difficult to implement in a non-Chromium browser, so it's no surprise that Mozilla, Apple, and Opera were unenthused.
Mozilla wasn't the only one with problem with PNaCl. They were definitely most opposed to it, but even Opera was strongly against it (granted it was around 2011).
