So, reflecting upon standards in the computer industry. Was it Google that needed to be kum-by-yayed and have gourmet garden visits in order to adopt the standard. It was indeed Google Native Client that was the reason they were reluctant to adopt the standard, correct? Well, let’s see. We can check Wikipedia. Of course, Wikipedia won’t tell you the exact reasons why, but they will tell you if the technology is still in use or not. And indeed, Google Native Client was discontinued, deprecated in favor of WebAssembly.
So, that closes the picture. We know Mozilla and Apple were champions of using plain JavaScript. Asm.js came from plain JavaScript then morphed into WebAssembly. Microsoft was in favor of enhancing JavaScript to eliminate the need for plugins for a long time, and indeed on their new Edge browser, they disabled plugin support entirely. So, out of the major browser vendors, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Mozilla, Google was the odd one out in technology adoption.
20180726/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Native_Client
Nevertheless, one really interesting thing came out of Google Native Client: ZeroVM. Single process virtualization using Google Native Client runtime. Indeed, very similar to the concepts of Docker, Emscripten, and WebAssembly here, but much more limited than any of those other mentioned technologies. So similar, that even the Wikipedia article lists Docker in the “See also” section.
So, your idea of running Docker in the browser? It is fully justified as a possibility, it’s just that the industry needs to advance to get there fully and adopt a standard way of doing it. All of the technologies have been designed and implemented already.
20180726/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZeroVM