Hacker News Reader

Comment by RyanZAG | Hacker News Reader

Ugh. Sounds like the next IE6 is here...

Can't wait to log into a bank that demands I installed Chrome to use their new 'security' or some web apps that won't run in anything but Chrome.

View on HN

This seems like more of a ChromeOS move to me, so that you can run native code on Atom and X86 machines. The knock on ChromeOS is always that it's "just a browser". I seriously doubt anyone is going to write their Etsy storefront in NaCl. The benefit here, of course, is that if someone does write the next Photoshop for ChromeOS machines, it should also run fine in OS X, Windows and Linux. Seems like a win for portability to me.

On the other hand, I can imagine that there is a set of people that want to run client side and yet not expose even obfusticated javascript.

PNaCL and asm.js are roughly the same in terms of "exposing" the code in this sense. Both can be easily disassembled/prettified using readily tools readily available today.

That worked out well for Java.

No, but it did for Flash.

Let's just say I'm pretty happy I'm not maintaining any products built with Flex/Air.

No, but it did for LLVM.

Ah yes. No one ever remembers JavaOS and what a shit crock that was.

I doubt Google wants to keep this Chrome-only. Just like SPDY, there isn't initially support on all platforms/browsers so you have to have a fallback. But if it catches on then you will see broader support over time.

there is actually a fallback -- mentioned in the post: pepper.js (http://trypepperjs.appspot.com/)

Having taken a good hard look at adding this to a non-chrome browser I can tell you it would not be a trivial task. You can't just take the code and re-use it elsewhere and re-inventing it would require constant catch up.

It seems that writing browsers is hard. Oh well, let's just continue using exactly the same javascript stack forever then.

Web apps that won't run in anything but chrome? There are already plenty. Picasa/Google+ photo editing for a start.

Which is actually literally done by hardcoding "plus.google.com" into Chrome:

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#chromium/src/c...

IE6 did not have an open source implementation that others could adopt.

You can't adopt the implementation of PNaCL either. It depends on PPAPI, which itself depends on vast amounts of implementation details of Chromium. There's no real attempt to decouple them.

People have in fact looked at what it would take to adopt PPAPI. The answer so far seems to be "you have to use Chromium, not another rendering engine".

The big difference, of course, is that you can be on any operating system with Chrome/Chromium. It's not ideal but that is huge. The "lockin" is no longer at the operating system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com