[Question] Firefox (and variants) users with WebAssembly disabled...

[OdinVex]

I refuse to let websites use WebAssembly (I don't trust them and WA can be more tedious to reverse-engineer) but Ruffle seems to require it... any way for an extension (Ruffle in this case, with trusted SWFs) to bypass that and execute WebAssembly just for Ruffle? Maybe Firefox could provide WASM for extensions (optionally) in a separate control so users can keep pages disabled but extensions (including for embedded) can be enabled? (And in the case of Ruffle maybe a prompt to allow/disallow case by case/site?)

[danielhjacobs]

I'm going to convert this to a discussion. The short answer is that I don't believe this is possible.

The request for this feature should probably be made either on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org (ask the Mozilla team to add this as a separate about:config option) and/or on https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues (it may not be appropriate for the W3C though as they handle cross-browser implementations and many other browsers either make it hard to disable WebAssembly or don't have a way to do so at all).

I think the only option is to enable it in about:config on the specific sites you want to use Ruffle on and disable it when not using them but as you know if those sites use WebAssembly themselves (unlikely but possible) they can execute it too.

It is possible to enable Ruffle itself only on a per site basis using default MV3 features but it still needs WebAssembly enabled while you browse the site. Worth noting the reason it uses WebAssembly is it was written in Rust as that was the easiest way to make the cross-platform desktop app, which came first, and then one of the early developers cross-compiled it to WebAssembly to allow the extension to exist.