Linux Solutions

Google’s not so quietly released beta of its Chrome browser is over, as the new version sheds its newbie skin and steps in to the light. The search giants vice president Marissa Mayer spilled the beans to Michael Arrington at LeWeb 2008, saying that the open source, browser which hit the ‘shelves’ over three months ago is due to be given its full release soon.

Google revealed that they are responding to demand for the browser from customers including OEMs. Whether the browser will be given a full release is uncertain, and the company has a habit of keeping its products in beta form for a long time – presumably that mistakes can be brushed over with the excuse – “ah, but its just the beta”.

Although the browser will run on both Windows and Linux-based systems, the Mac version of the browser remains elusive. And according to the reports, the browser is far from completion.

Also, in related news Google announced an early developer release of Native Client earlier this week that consists of a runtime, a browser plugin, and a set of GCC-based completion tools.

Native Client has the task of running native code from web-based applications on x86 Widows, Linux and Mac. The company revealed the Native Client on Monday for testing by the open source community, and want them to challenge the usability and security of the browser.

The company has proposed a ‘two sandboxes’ system, which are called the inner and outer sandboxes, which prevents untrusted modules from the web spreading throughout your system. Google’s model sees application calls made by using ptrace in Linux and Mac OS X. Access control lists have been proposed for Native Client on Windows.

Native Client wants code from web-based applications such as photo sharing and editing to run natively on you x86 machine.

Brad Chen, with Google’s Native Client Team, said: “For example, imagine that you run a photo-sharing website and want to let your users touch up their photos without leaving your site. Today, you could provide this feature using a combination of JavaScript and server side processing.”

“This approach, however, would cause huge amounts of image data to be transferred between browser and the server, leading to an experience that would probably be painfully slow for users who just want to make a few simple changes. With the ability to seamlessly run native code on the user’s machine, you could instead perform the actual image processing on the desktop CPU, resulting in a much more responsive application by minimizing data transfer and latency,” he added

Google is keen to ensure that application like this are “browser neutral”, allowing application and content creators to build their applications without having to work around browser compatibility issues that are rampant at the moment.

Some people have noted that Google’s Native Client looks to be a challenge by the company against Microsoft’s Windows desktop. But should Microsoft be worried?

All things considered, Native Client could provide more options for Windows-application developers that are keen to put their software online and freeing themselves from the desktop and allowing them to not be tied to Microsoft’s Silverlight browser-based plugin for video and audio. How far are Microsoft willing to work with Google making its Windows API’s open and available to the sandbox architecture.