Webpages being rendered framebuffers would be terrible for consistency and accessibility. All the logic for layout computation, responsive design, font rendering, and literally thousands of other things browser have developed over the decades would go out the window.
But on the topic of multi-architecture, that’s really what web assembly is. I’d be surprised if it didn’t continue too become more important, it looks like it’s escaping the browser and into backend apps and server code too.
GUI frameworks have done accessibility and consistency better than browsers (which includes layouts, font rendering, etc) for decades. The browsers are literally just inner platforms that take the capabilities available in the GUI framework, and make it available through a set of API (javascript), content (HTML) and styling (CSS). Moving applications from browser tech to GUI framework tech doesn't throw anything away because GUI frameworks embed widgets that are browser windows (https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtwebengine-overview.html)
I wanted to love webassembly, but each time I've looked into it, it places significant constraints on the application developer in terms of networking, file systems, and many other things that I consider to be table stakes for modern application development. Similar to Web GPU support, it's just another inner platform with a bunch of restrictions that prevent me, as an experienced developer, from using high quality GUI frameworks and all the nice things that OSes have developed over the decades.
Webpages being rendered framebuffers would be terrible for consistency and accessibility. All the logic for layout computation, responsive design, font rendering, and literally thousands of other things browser have developed over the decades would go out the window.
But on the topic of multi-architecture, that’s really what web assembly is. I’d be surprised if it didn’t continue too become more important, it looks like it’s escaping the browser and into backend apps and server code too.