Here's something that didn't happen with an announcement: the floor for what a browser can compute, without sending your data anywhere, has risen considerably in the past two years. Not because browsers got flashy new APIs, but because specific WebAssembly capabilities — SIMD instructions, the GC proposal, threading — matured enough that tool developers could actually rely on them. The tools that benefited are exactly the ones that don't require a login. That's not a coincidence. When computation moves fully into the browser, the justification for user accounts evaporates. No server processing means no job to track, no identity to associate with a request, no email required to retrieve your results. If you've already read the basics of how WebAssembly powers free browser tools , this goes a level deeper: what specifically has improved, what tool categories are now practical that weren't before, and why the architectural shift matters for privacy in particular.…