Google has been demonstrating its sandboxing technology for making web applications perform at similar levels to those associated with native desktop applications.
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 is 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 in San Francisco on Thursday, it demonstrated its work towards making that happen.
David Sehr, a tech lead for Native Client, showed off the web workers standard, which lets web pages assign different tasks to independent processing threads, effectively letting a browser perform background operations without impeding on the user's experience. Web workers are one element of the ambitious but still not finalised HTML 5 standard.
Currently, browsers run software much more slowly than native applications that run on the desktop. Google wants to speed them up, 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.
"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.
Google 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, however, Google is trying to resolve Native Client security issues before promoting it more widely among programmers, much less mainstream users.
Sehr said he hopes Google's browser, Chrome, will introduce Web Worker support 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 colours and tones adjusted with a variety of sliders. There are online photo editors available today, but they typically use Adobe's Flash plug-in.
