Business Tech

Brad Chen, engineering manager of the Google Native Client

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--Google wants its Native Client technology to be a little more native.

Google Native Client, still highly experimental, lets browsers run program modules natively on an x86 processor for higher performance than with Web programming technologies such as JavaScript or Flash that involve more software layers to process and execute the code. But to use it, there's a significant barrier: people must install a browser plug-in.

However, Google wants to make the technology more broadly accessible in browsers through new technology coming to HTML, the standard used to build Web pages, and at the Google I/O developer conference Thursday demonstrated its work to make that happen.

Specifically, David Sehr, a tech lead for Native Client, showed off Web Workers standard to let Web pages assign different tasks to independent processing "threads," effectively letting a browser walk and chew gum at the same time rather than waiting for one chore to be finished before the next begins. Web workers are one element of the ambitious but still not finalized HTML 5 standard.

Why care? Because today your browser runs software excruciatingly slowly compared to native applications that run on your computer, but Google wants to speed them up tremendously, a move that would add a lot of muscle to its ambition to make Web-based software more competitive.

"We want to be within single-digit percentages of what you can do with the best desktop native code," said Brad Chen, engineering manager of the Google Native Client (NaCl) project in a talk at Google I/O.

Examples of what can be done include decoding video, encrypting data, video game physics engines, and face recognition. More interesting, perhaps, is when Native Client can work in conjunction with another Google browser plug-in, O3D, that lets browsers take advantage of hardware to accelerate 3D graphics.

Google demonstrated a browser-based image editor built with Google Native Client.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

"With O3D, we think we'll be able to enable high-quality games, the kind you're accustomed to seeing on consoles, as well as CAD applications," Chen said.

Although Google is working hard to enable more powerful Web applications, it's not all altruistic. The company has a growing stable of applications including Google Docs, Google Maps, and Gmail that can become much more competitive with desktop technology such as Microsoft Office. For now, though, Google is trying to hammer out Native Client security issues before promoting it more widely among programmers, much less mainstream users.

Sehr said Google's browser, Chrome, will introduce Web Worker support, he hoped within the next couple weeks. Google has been touting HTML 5 features at Google I/O, and Chrome gives Google a way to advance the state of Web application art.

Though other browsers are building in Web worker support, too, for now the technology is rough and certainly not a foundation a Web programmer could expect widespread support for among browsers.

Google plans to support Native Client both through Web Workers and the plug-in, Chen said in an interview. Built-in support in the browser is helpful, but Chen said Web Workers have undesirable limitations for many chores. For example, the plug-in is necessary for applications that require a fast response to user input, he said.

One such example Google showed at the conference was a photo editor. With it, images could be rotated, zoomed, and have colors and tones adjusted with a variety of sliders. There are online photo editors available today, but they typically use Adobe Systems' Flash plug-in.

This fractal graphics demo showed off a forthcoming Chrome ability to access Native Client applications through the HTML 5 Web Worker standard.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Rumors have abounded over the years about a Google operating system, perhaps based on the Ubuntu version of Linux widely used within the company, but on Monday the company revealed an open-source project that provides a different answer to the same problem: Native Client.

The reason I've been skeptical about Google releasing an operating system of its own is that the company has such a Web-based view of the world. But Web apps have limits, impressive gains of Google Docs notwithstanding, and Native Client is geared to address those.

"At Google we're always trying to make the Web a better platform. That's why we're working on Native Client, a technology that aims to give Web developers access to the full power of the client's CPU while maintaining the browser neutrality, OS portability and safety that people expect from Web applications," said Brad Chen of Google's Native Client team in a blog posting.

Google has a three-lobed mission: search, ads, and apps. It does well on the first two, but Web-based applications remain rough for most users. Native Client could change that if Google develops the project to maturity, convinces people to install it, and convinces programmers to write for it.

The software plug-in works in conjunction with various Web browsers but lets Web-based applications take advantage of a computer's significant processing horsepower. That puts it in a similar camp as Sun Microsystems' Java, Microsoft's Silverlight, and Adobe Systems' Flash, which, like Native Client, include a "runtime" foundation for running the software.

Although Native Client is just a research project at this stage, the move could have powerful long-term consequences for the battle to create the most compelling foundation for Web-based applications. The technology philosophically meshes with Adobe's hybrid philosophy of running applications both on servers and PCs.

So far, Native Client works on Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome on any modern system with an x86 processor running Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux, Google said.