Google Chrome Will Eventually Run Inside Native Client

One of the technologies Google has been working on for quite some time now, with Chrome, is Native Client. NaCl for short, it enables websites to serve built-in apps in native code for the machine they're running on rather than a standard web language, like JavaScript.

Native Client promises to bring a huge performance boost and to enable web apps to be on par with desktop apps running locally. And Google is now ramping up efforts to start using Native Client in the wild.

Native Client is bundled with recent versions of Google Chrome, but it's still not enabled by default. And Chrome is still the only browser supporting the Google-built technology.

At the Google I/O developer conference, the Chrome team reiterated Google's support for Native Client. In fact, Google is working on extending Native Client to be more than just a way of running code snippets, it wants the entire browser to run on top of it, for added security.

Chrome already uses a sandbox to isolate all web content from the system it's running on, but Native Client comes with a few more security features. And since Native Client is just a way of running native, binary code, there's nothing stopping the team from trying to run the entire browser in it.

But the technology is far from ready for this, the first step will be to run the built-in PDF reader with Native Client, something that Google wants to do this year.

In the meantime, Google is working on making Native Client more appealing to the web community. One way it's doing this is with PNaCl, a new project that fixes one of Native Client's biggest weaknesses.

With NaCl, code has to be compiled for all of the supported architectures, meaning a 32-bit version a 64-bit version and so on. With PNaCl, code is only compiled to Low Level Virtual Machine bitcode, one step above binary machine code, and is only converted to the proper architecture once it's been downloaded.

Of course, this adds a performance penalty, on top of the overhead NaCl already adds. So far, other browser makers remain unconvinced saying that standard web technologies are good enough and that improving JavaScript engines, something Google knows a thing or two, should be enough for what most developers need.