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Comment by noibl | Hacker News Reader

Just like Wave, NaCl is an inspiring but highly technical innovation that Google started trying to attract community interest in while it was still on the drawing board. Mozilla and others have already turned their noses up at it. What Google needs to do is finish the thing quietly, build something spectacular with it, get lots of people using it, and then casually slip into the conversation that other browsers are welcome to use it.. if, you know, they want to.. (then shrug nonchalently).

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I can't imagine anything more spectacular than running native code inside the browser securely and across multiple OS.

Google is handling this just as they should and I can't see how else would you introduce such a major piece of browser infrastructure.

This doesn't even compare to Google Wave.

Yes, it's 'spectacular' to you and I. I meant in the broader sense of spectacle, the sense in which people on the street want to try it out because it's like nothing they've ever seen before. And that is possible with NaCl if expectations are properly managed.

People on the street are not interested in browser implementations and are therefore not the group which needs to be impressed in this case.

We already know what the killer demo is going to be, Doom in the browser.

Doom 3 maybe. We already have Quake 2 running in the browser using WebGL (http://code.google.com/p/quake2-gwt-port/), anything less would undersell NaCl.

I was afraid of that, but yes, you're right. Doom is old enough to run with JS already.

Google should tune into WIIFM: http://larryborsato.com/blog/2010/01/wiifm/ ...what exactly is the end customer going to do with this?

If the end customer is developers, then yes, it's interesting and google should promote it heavily at something like GoogleIO or other dev venue.

If it's for customers, it's going to need a killer app.

(edited to remove anchor tag)

I suspect games will be the killer app for this, though the barrier to in-browser games is getting lower all the time with hardware-accelerated canvas becoming the norm. Nonetheless, high end games will probably continue to require native hardware access for the foreseeable future. You can't exactly build Call of Duty in JavaScript+Canvas or WebGL or whatever.

Many people thought replacing email and IM with some grand collaborative technology would be spectacular too. A lot of articles were written about Wave, breathlessly reciting the history of email in their opening paragraphs as if it was already a given that Wave was a successor of equal magnitude.

I'm not convinced at this point in time that NaCl offers enough advantages over the rapid development of JavaScript or the power and speed of operating system APIs. Apps running in the browser was attempted in the 90s with Java, and NaCl been around for a few years now. This link is just announcing that it's supporting the Pepper plug-in interface in Chrome.

I wonder how people would react if a different company did something like that with their browser.

There are a couple of companies you could be talking about. If you mean Apple and their development of the KHTML engine into something that has been embedded in lots of other software with hugely beneficial effects for the web, then yes, good precedent. If you mean Microsoft and the distribution of Silverlight, the connection is somewhat more tenuous because Silverlight is a solution in search of a problem.

Note the distinctions: open source, platform agnostic, solves a real problem.

Silverlight and Native Client solve the same problem, they just do it differently (and you could argue Native Client solves it 'better').

I assumed the parent was alluding to ActiveX.

I would like to point out that the failing of wave was primarily that nobody found it to be useful, not that it was over-hyped. I can't imagine NaCl having that problem.

I don't want to go off on a tangent but I think it's a relevant point that the overall usefulness of both technologies is strongly related to having diverse implementations. I'm not saying hype is the issue but rather the trying to get cooperation from the industry and competitors when the feasibility of the project isn't entirely proven.

Wave was definitely overhyped. That's why so many sought beta invites and why so many were confused and disappointed when they finally got in.

Unity games without a plugin would impress a lot of people. And it would have geek appeal as they currently don't have a linux implementation of the plugin.

I don't know what the progress is with this, but they were talking it up last year:

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/05/19/google-android-and-the-f...

Is Lego Star Wars in the browser enough to make people sit up and pay attention? I think it might be.

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