Native Client: Getting Ready for Takeoff
Friday, February 18, 2011
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native clientOver the last few months we have been hard at work getting Native Client ready to support the newPepper plug-in interface. Native Client is an open source technology that allows you to build web applications that seamlessly and safely execute native compiled code inside the browser. Today, we’ve reached an important milestone in our efforts to make Native Client modules as portable and secure as JavaScript, by making available a first release of the revamped Native Client SDK.
The SDK now includes support for a comprehensive set of Pepper interfaces for compute, audio, and 2D Native Client modules. These interfaces are close to being stable, with some important exceptions that are listed in the release notes.
In addition, we’ve focused on improving security. We have enabled auto-update and an outer sandbox. This allowed us to remove the expiration date and localhost security restrictions we had adopted in previous research-focused releases. Beyond security, we’ve also improved the mechanism for fetching Native Client modules based on the instruction set architecture of the target machine, so developers don’t need to worry about this any more.
We are excited to see Native Client progressively evolve into a developer-ready technology. In the coming months we will be adding APIs for 3D graphics, local file storage, WebSockets, peer-to-peer networking, and more. We’ll also be working on Dynamic Shared Objects (DSOs), a feature that will eventually allow us to provide Application Binary Interface (ABI) stability.
Until the ABI becomes stable, Native Client will remain off by default. However, given the progress we’ve made, you can now sticky-enable Native Client in Chrome 10+ through the about:flags dialog. Otherwise, you can continue using a command line flag to enable Native Client when you want to.
A big goal of this release is to enable developers to start building Native Client modules for Chrome applications. Please watch this blog for updates and use our discussion group for questions, feedback, and to engage with the Native Client community.
Faster than a speeding rabbit: speed, sync, and settings
Thursday, February 17, 2011 | 3:00 PM
In the spirit of the lunar new year, we’re excited to kick off the Year of the Rabbit with a slew of enhancements in the Chrome beta channel. Today’s new beta includes a dramatic improvement in JavaScript speed, new password sync features, and entirely revamped browser settings.
In our new beta release, JavaScript is as quick as a bunny. With a new speed boost that we previewed in December, Chrome’s JavaScript engine V8 runs compute-intensive JavaScript applications even more quickly than before. In fact, this beta release sports a whopping 66% improvement on the V8 benchmark suite over our current stable release.
This release also includes a preliminary implementation of GPU-accelerated video. Users with capable graphics hardware should see a significant decrease in CPU usage. In full screen mode, CPU usage may decrease by as much as 80%! This means better battery life so you can keep going and going like that pink bunny in the commercials.
For those of you who enjoy the convenience of saving passwords in Chrome, you can synchronize your saved passwords across multiple computers, along with your bookmarks, preferences, themes, and extensions. For added security, you can choose to encrypt your synced passwords with your own secret sync passphrase. To enable sync, visit the “Personal Stuff” section of Chrome’s settings dialog.
Speaking of settings, you’ll notice we have reworked the look and feel of the settings dialogs. Instead of opening in a separate window, they now open in a tab. More importantly, we’ve added two new settings features that make it easy to customize Chrome to your liking. Firstly, if you can’t remember where a particular pesky configuration setting is, simply type its name into the search box to see the settings that match as you type. Secondly, you can also now jump directly to most settings pages using their own dedicated URLs, without needing to navigate through a sequence of windows. Here’s a short video of the new settings interface in action:
As always, we’re eager to get your feedback, and look forward to bringing this basket of beta-fortified carrots to the stable channel over the coming weeks! (For those of you keen for some fun and games in this Year of the Rabbit, we’ll leave you with the mind-bending #ThinkFastGame speed challenge to try out alongside our new beta.)
Posted by Jeff Chang, Product Manager and Min Li Chan, Product Marketing Manager
In our new beta release, JavaScript is as quick as a bunny. With a new speed boost that we previewed in December, Chrome’s JavaScript engine V8 runs compute-intensive JavaScript applications even more quickly than before. In fact, this beta release sports a whopping 66% improvement on the V8 benchmark suite over our current stable release.
This release also includes a preliminary implementation of GPU-accelerated video. Users with capable graphics hardware should see a significant decrease in CPU usage. In full screen mode, CPU usage may decrease by as much as 80%! This means better battery life so you can keep going and going like that pink bunny in the commercials.
For those of you who enjoy the convenience of saving passwords in Chrome, you can synchronize your saved passwords across multiple computers, along with your bookmarks, preferences, themes, and extensions. For added security, you can choose to encrypt your synced passwords with your own secret sync passphrase. To enable sync, visit the “Personal Stuff” section of Chrome’s settings dialog.
Speaking of settings, you’ll notice we have reworked the look and feel of the settings dialogs. Instead of opening in a separate window, they now open in a tab. More importantly, we’ve added two new settings features that make it easy to customize Chrome to your liking. Firstly, if you can’t remember where a particular pesky configuration setting is, simply type its name into the search box to see the settings that match as you type. Secondly, you can also now jump directly to most settings pages using their own dedicated URLs, without needing to navigate through a sequence of windows. Here’s a short video of the new settings interface in action:
As always, we’re eager to get your feedback, and look forward to bringing this basket of beta-fortified carrots to the stable channel over the coming weeks! (For those of you keen for some fun and games in this Year of the Rabbit, we’ll leave you with the mind-bending #ThinkFastGame speed challenge to try out alongside our new beta.)
Posted by Jeff Chang, Product Manager and Min Li Chan, Product Marketing Manager
