Native Client Makes Its Debut in Google Chrome 14 Beta

Google has moved Google Chrome 14 to the beta channel, making the technology and new features in the still testing version of Chrome available to a wider number of people. One of the most touted new things in Google Chrome 14 Beta is support for Native Client which is now built into the browser and enabled by default.

There are other, under-the-hood updates as well, Google Chrome 14, at least at this stage, seems to be focused more on what's going on behind the scenes rather than what users see in front of them.

"We’re pleased to announce the integration of Native Client into Chrome. Native Client allows C and C++ code to be seamlessly executed inside the browser with security restrictions similar to JavaScript," Chris Rogers, Software Engineer at Google, explained the gist of it.

Native Client has been a long time coming and Google has been talking about it for more than a year. Even if it's now fully supported in Google Chrome, don't expect too many apps and websites to take advantage of it too soon.

Still, Native Client holds a lot of promise for the web. It's an open source technology, but it's been developed and pushed by Google. It's aimed at making web apps as fast as native ones and as safe as websites.

Of course, there are some compromises, running native code is going to be riskier than things like JavaScript, but Google believes it's worth the trade-off.

At this point, Google is using the Pepper framework for enabling developers to builds apps leveraging Native Client. Google has bigger plans for Native Client, once the technology is up to spec, it wants Chrome to run entirely on top of NaCl which should add another layer of abstractization, virtualization if you will, from the hardware level.