Completely disagree.

I don't even think Google "adopted" NaCl, it's still more a private project of a few, compared to Chrome(OS) and Android.

NaCl is one of those technologies that I secretly hope fails. Pull the plug on x86 already, FFS.

Saying that the Open Web needs an app-store to compete with the walled gardens is also a fallacy. Quite the contrary, the web competes with the walled gardens because it doesn't have such master-record. You will see this pattern repeat itself; the chaotic nature of the web beats any attempts to impose "order" upon it. Cf. the dismal failure of dmoz and other curated directories, compared to search engines.

If you want to use performance critical software that pushes the limits of your machine, download it, use Java or whatever.

I doubt the app-store model will survive long term; individual merchants and vendors tend to move faster than the infrastructure that houses their shops and supports their business (almost literally.) The moment a few merchants diverge from the proscribed machinery of the market, and exploit inefficiencies, as they will, is the moment you will see this model come apart at the seams. If the entire model isn't killed along with its platform by changes in technology.

The one good example I can give you is the buildings built throughout South East Asia to house street-vendors. Specially in Cambodia and Vietnam, the governments built multi-story shopping centers, just piles of concrete, and invited vendors to push their carts in and congregate. The markets might have looked like proper malls at some point, but with time, they're just shaded bazaars like any other street market, except this one isn't dried by the sun and there is no drainage. Over time, the building has all the appeal of a street market, except you have to climb up some slippery stairs tightly packed with pickpockets. However, most higher-end merchants gather around the vertical-bazaars and open proper walk-in shops with more products, better presentation, and all the amenities of a private property (fan, seats, water cooler, bathroom, TV/radio, etc.)

It's ironic to me, how self contradictory the title is. NativeClient is not a way to make the web more open, in fact it's a way to make the web more binary/obscured.

Low level memory access, pointers and the likes are the 'horrors' Java/C#/<name your high level language> programmers are running away from. The author fails to point out why would anyone want low level memory access.

> Preemptive response: But NativeClient is x86! Basing the open web on a peculiar, old instruction set is a terrible idea! That’s why I point to LLVM and Portable NativeClient (PNaCl). It’s not a burden to target PNaCl by default, and cross-compile to x86 and ARM if they matter to you.

This seems to imply that the browser should have a compiler that complies the low level bytecode into real machine code. The author should realize that this would be almost identical to running an SWF or a Java plugin, which makes the whole idea pointless.

I disagree with the article's sentiment. I'm glad the web is focusing on Javascript. Here's why: the web is a nice, text-based environment that is safe to execute on your computer. Each web resource may contain active scripts but they are pretty innocuous.

Native applications are binary and can do all sorts of nasty things. Sure, this sandbox is supposed to be safe, but what if it's not? When an application is delivered over the web, one should really make sure that it wasn't somehow changed or sabotaged. Right now this is impossible. At the very least, this proposal would have to be implemented so we can trust what is being downloaded: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2024164

Here is what I suggest: native libraries should expose their objects to javascript, which should do the majority of the work. Kind of like PhoneGap does on the phones. These native libraries (like OpenGL, say), should be served from cdns over httpc:// and the user agent can verify that they are safe after downloading them.

Let's ignore the philosophical or design issues surrounding native client and look at a practical one.

Why does the article take issue with Mozilla alone? Surely they aren't the only browser vendor that won't be implementing native client. Mozilla is being singled out here precisely because other major platforms are considered to be lost causes.

Safari and Internet Explorer are unlikely to support NaCl for obvious competitive issues. Heavily curated platforms like the iPhone prevent even third parties from supporting such a feature.

Once you realize that even with Mozilla support you'd still only be looking at a ~60% penetration, you're going to be working around it anyway. Once you're dictating platforms, plugins or providing a fall back implementation I'm not sure if support in one specific browser is going to make or break anything. If you're willing to target only half the web you're simply not that concerned about ubiquity to start with.

The only way I can see PNaCl catching on is if Google deploys it in Chrome and the Android Browser and creates an automatic fallback to a javascript PNaCl interpreter for the browsers that don't have it. Then it becomes about "why is Firefox/IE/iOS slower at running this webapp?"

But even then you'd need Google or someone else to deploy some interesting PNaCl apps to make having it worthwhile.

It's a pity that this is such a long shot because JS isn't a particularly good language and the stack we seem to be heading towards (and that Mozilla favors) is something like CoffeeScript -> Javascript -> bytecode -> machine code. Javascript doesn't seem like a very interesting compiler target or an easy language to make fast[1]. Maybe the new ES5 strict mode or some other subset of javascript can be agreed upon as a basis for compilers, that is easier to run fast. Then that can be the IL for the web.

[1] Best implementations are 3-5x slower than the JVM according to http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/

There's no shortage of failed great technology, unfortunately.

You need a way to get this launched, which means you need widely-available clients (PNaCl), and you need the content as otherwise nobody needs those clients you don't yet have, and you need the tools for developing the content which aren't available, and you need a way to interest enough folks in this technology into adopting it, whether by pushing them (cash) or pulling them (cool, useful, solves my problem, etc).

And you need to sort out and preferably prevent the security attacks and how you're planning on providing content protection (yes, you're going to need some sort of copy protection get more than token commercial content), the usual UI adoption issues for non-tech users (they're the big market, and not the geeks), and with all the usual nasties that can derail or dissuade the early adopters of any technology.

Getting to critical mass with these sorts of products is inherently entertaining, and involves rather more thought and cash and effort than with the technology itself. Have you looked at how all that'll happen here, rather than looking (just) at the (admittedly cool) technology?

And so the pendulum has swung back. I believe Mozilla's action is rational assuming my logic is not flawed. See if you can unravel it.

Premise: The more indistinguishable a browser gets from its underlying operating system the more of the properties of said system it must share. Thus stretching the nature of the abstraction, making it shallower (till the machine) hence also increasing the probability of leaks in said abstraction.

Speciation will occur across system architecture peculiarities and cause splintering of browsers. Destroying their main advantage - which is the strong guarantees it makes on your deployed code being accessible across a vast range of platforms. That is, physical constraints and combinatorial considerations will make it very hard to write code that uses architecture specific optimizations and assumptions while still falling back robustly across all devices. And if it can work everywhere then it must not be directly exposing such a hardware layer and then, what is the point. The same can be acheived by optimizing javascript JITing. The JITter can take care of that optimal device specific optimized code generator. Google wants to create an OS, Mozilla wants to improve the browser.

In particular, as margins from speed, ui and features decrease; each vendor will become incentivized to avoid commodification and distinguish themselves from their competitors by moving faster than the glacial speeds of standard bodies and introducing incompatibilities. While being slow to pick up those of others. In essence each browser would basically evolve into and become indistinguishable from a current OS with all its pitfalls (isomorphic rather than homomorphic as currently). And if we are targeting specific VMs then we may as well factor out the browsers as they are no longer a vital component of the equation. Completing the cycle. To be restarted with metabrowsers.

Seems to me that pushing for native into the browser without carefully considering the tradeoffs is foolish. You cannot have uniformity without sacrificing diversity. This seems like the original Java dream rebooted. But it seems to me that wanting the same UI and code to work everywhere while taking advantage of underlying hardware, while automatically adapting and falling back on visuals and optimizations is a pipe dream. That is of course, until OS's and programs become intelligent and partially alive. At least microbe level intelligence. And virus like adaptibility.

Aside: NaCl appears to have a decent amount in common with silverlight. Particularly in terms of tradeoffs, weaknesses and gains.

Considering NaCl in the context of papers like http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/594 (timing the CPU cache to break AES) is... interesting. You'd hope that Google would have considered such issues, but a quick search doesn't yield anything.

If NativeClient is available as a plugin, can't Firefox users benefit from the technology regardless of whatever Mozilla thinks? I like the idea of lightweight x86 sandboxes like Native Client and vx32, but I understand why Mozilla isn't very interested in them. As long as nothing is done to actively hinder their development and use by those who are interested, is there really a problem here?

Obscuring code isn't a bad thing, it's what I miss about c/c++. It was so much easier to share a library without giving away source code.

The increased power that NaCL would add would enable more disruptive applications than just js apps. Client side custom video encoding, browser based distributed computing, and yes again a better economy of buying selling software libraries.

Think of it this way:

Flash, Java, Javacript, et al are great for the web because they are "write once, run anywhere". The same source code runs everywhere. That is what the web is all about. HTML and CSS are not scripting languages and they are also "write once, run anywhere". That is how the web delivers your programs.

Now, what will your Native Client do?

It will have COMPILED code for ONE platform. Like in C++ where you "write once, compile everywhere". Except you probably won't be able to compile everywhere. The point of the web is that any platform should be able to run your app.

On the other hand, I can see Native Client as being useful for extension libraries. You know, like PhoneGap plugins. The Javascript can test if the object is there, and if it is, use some standard interface. You could build up a standard library of these. As long as it is available on a wide enough range of platforms. Certain APIs are already exposed by the browser, through HTML5, that were originally in Google Gears.

Look, I agree that it's more of a philosophical thing, and indeed you are welcome to make an extension for Mozilla and all the other browsers. But the security risks alone will make this a tough sell to INCLUDE in a browser -- harming the spirit of the web. Not only that, but the web is totally against "favoring one platform over another" ... it is BECAUSE of the web that the platforms are able to work better together.

People are going to want to target their C, Java, Python, etc. code to the browser. The only question is what is the better target, Javascript as a VM or a sandboxed LLVM?

Honestly the inclusion of NaCl wouldn't change that much. JavaScript would still be the easiest path for most developers to choose. It will be only language that the browser hosts the interpreter and has no compilation step.

I agree that JavaScript may not be the optimal solution (our kids will hate us for making it the language of the web).

But why LLVM? Why not something more standard like CIL or Java bytecode? I would personally love to see CIL in all browsers. It compresses much better than LLVM bytecode...

The web is starting to come into its own thanks to relentless efforts to improve a limited set of tools: HTML, CSS, Javascript. What the web needs is not more tools, but for the tools it already has to continue to be improved.

Google don't even enable NaCl by default on their Cr-48 laptops!

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NativeClient is a bunch of horse poo and shouldn't be in a browser anyway.