14 DAY TRIAL // Google developers have announced they will be introducing their Native Client technology to the Google Chrome browser as they believe it is mature and secure enough to see a public release. The announcement was made by Brad Chen, Google's Native Client engineering manager, in a mailing list. The technology was previously available only as a browser plugin.
“Based on our experience to date, we believe that the basic architecture of our system is sound and the implementation is supportable. So now we are undertaking a number of tasks to transition Native Client from a research technology to a development platform,” said Chen.
The technology allows software from web sites to run directly on the processor and not inside the browser. This has the obvious advantage of being significantly faster than applications written in JavaScript or any of the other scripting languages that have to be 'compiled' on the machine every time they are run. Google is very interested in the technology as many of its web apps, from Gmail to Google Docs, are very resource hungry and could see a dramatic improvement in performance.
While the advantages of running native code are clear, there is one big disadvantage and that has to do with security. Letting web sites have direct access to the processor could pose a series of security risks if the technology isn't designed very well. The developers believe they have solved the security issues and that Native Client is secure enough to be implemented. They have managed this by adding a series of security measures to the technology, like the fact that Native Client examines the software prior to it being run, an action called static analysis, and blocks the ones exhibiting potentially dangerous behavior. The software is also run in a protected sandbox mode similar to the way Google Chrome, one of the most secure browsers out there, handles every web page.
“To date, Native Client has been presented primarily as a research project. We recognized the underlying technology to be ambitious and risky, and felt strongly that a generous measure of public scrutiny was appropriate before we committed to any definite plans. In addition to multiple internal security and design reviews, we did a number of things to expose our work outside Google and encourage community scrutiny,” Chen added.