NaCl

Couple of days ago I read an IEEE journal article about Google's "NaCl" (Native Client), which was published in the beginning of 2010 (and in a first version of that in 2009). Now, meaning two days ago, David Springer talked at Google I/O 2011 about it:

After reading the article I thought this is quite useless, nevertheless interesting, because it would be yet another browser plugin people need to install. And since there is already this debate about Flash and that it's all dispensable nowadays because we got HTML5 now, I felt this won't have a big future.

But I didn't think of (or actually wasn't aware of) what Google is doing: they will release those new Chromebooks in June which run Chrome OS. Chromebooks are basically browser-only-machines, so there is nothing but Chrome and everything runs inside the cloud. And with that in mind it makes sense! Chromebooks can't do much except what the browser allows to do (so Javascript, WebGL, etc ... and probably some Chrome OS special stuff). So they need some extension to that -- were NaCl comes in.

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