Google Native Client, from the Cloud to the Desktop, but Not for IE

While Microsoft is effortlessly pushing Windows into the Cloud, not only with the collection of Windows Live applications and services, but also with Windows Azure OS and the Azure Services Platform, Google is making inroads into the desktop. Not only did the Mountain View Search giant release Google Chrome, but now it is laboring to make browser-based applications feel right at home on the desktop via Native Client.

Despite embracing the operating system, the Native Client remains very much a Cloud technology, focusing on the evolution of applications running with the web as their platform. In this regard, among the goals of Native Client, Google enumerated ensuring browser neutrality, but also OS portability, along with a high level of security for web apps.

“Our release consists of a runtime, a browser plugin, and a set of GCC-based compilation tools,” revealed Brad Chen, Native Client Team. “Together, these components make it possible to build applications that run in a web browser, but incorporate native code modules.”

“To help protect users from malware and to maintain portability, we have defined strict rules for valid modules. At a high level, these rules specify: 1) that all modules meet a set of structural criteria that make it possible to reliably disassemble them into instructions, and 2) that modules may not contain certain instruction sequences. This framework aims to enable our runtime to detect and prevent potentially dangerous code from running and spreading.”

Google Native Client is available as an open-source project designed, as Google indicated, for the research and security communities. The source code associated with the project is up for grabs under the BSD license, tailored to Linux, Mac OS, and Windows. Moreover, although Chen explained that web applications would be able to run via any browser on any operating system, he failed to mention Internet Explorer among the browsers that would play well with Native Client.

“The release contains the experimental compilation tools and runtime so that you can write and run portable code modules that will work in Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Google Chrome on any modern Windows, Mac, or Linux system that has an x86 processor. We're working on supporting other CPU architectures (such as ARM and PPC) to make this technology work on the many types of devices that connect to the web today,” Chen stated.