WebAssembly is shaping the future of web development, allowing browsers to tackle increasingly complex and resource intensive tasks. However, despite its promise of near-native performance, WebAssembly performance can still lag significantly behind that of native applications.

This talk explores the challenges and opportunities of executing compute-intensive workloads within browser VMs, with a focus on experimental extensions to WebAssembly. Through real-world experiments, it demonstrates how these extensions can optimize memory management, leverage hardware acceleration, and enhance interoperability within the browser ecosystem to unlock performance gains.