Review and ideas (deployment, OpenGL and killer apps)

[Simon Huet]

I am quite frankly impressed by your technology. I am a Linux user
with a background on security and I will like to make a review
combining those two perspectives : a classic user and computer savy.

I am so tired of Flash from a user point of view, I feel it's slow and
memory hungry. Specially when you have 10 youtube video embed in one
page, it make my system crawl to its knees when they don't even play.
Security is extremely well done because you can't do really much but
some security flaws have been found over the years and it's still
possible to overload the plugin and exploit it. Applications are
limited. At most you have a few games and video player. Some 3D has
started to appear but it's still mostly not used. Coding and
development tools are limited to almost what Adobe can deliver.

I don't dislike Java applets. Users always seem to dislike it for its
loading time. It's JIT and its normal to have some loading time. I was
really impressed by the port of Quake 2 (called Jake2). It runs
somewhat fast enough for me but it's a port, a rewriting of a game in
another language. Security is its most trusted feature. Even if it
relies on the user to accept to execution of code, it's always in a
context of an applet with the corresponding security model which does
not allow arbitrary read/write on disk.

I won't talk about ActiveX. Well to me at first when it was introduced
in the late 90's I thought it was a great idea : convert a regular
application code into something to goes inside the browser but its
security made it impossible to use. Still it was a good idea only
badly implemented.

And here comes Native Client. I have this feeling again I had when I
heard about ActiveX and really hoping you're going to get it right.
What I like about it is everything. It's genius. I am still blasted by
the Quake demo. I didn't have too much trouble compiling the source
and that's what is genius about "Native Client". It's not like Jake2
which is a port of code from C to Java, all I needed was to recompile
the source with just a few modifications. That's the beauty of it. The
application can be written in any language. System calls are analyze
to trap any unwanted result. That's genius. Making it open-source is
the right thing to do. Thank you Google for that, maybe this time it
will be done the right way.

There are things missing still. The big one is deployment of
applications. I don't know how you will resolve that. Your intentions
are to speed things up on the web but to do that I must have a piece
of code on my computer, in a safe place. One thing that could be done
is to combine part of this inside the browser like Firefox is doing it
for extensions. I think it's the right way but I don't know how Google
feel about Mozilla Corp. The other way would be to use a system like
war files for tomcat : one file containing all the that is needed,
uncompressed it somewhere safe, not writable by the application and
give the application the ability to write somewhere else some settings
and have a limit on the size of this folder. I would not like a
setting file like in Java because it will break a lot of application.

I saw a post about OpenGL and how it's not possible to use it. I don't
know why it can't be used but I am sure it can be, I don't know how
hard it will be. If the SDL libraries can be called from "Native
Client" I am sure OpenGL can.

What can I say more? "Native Client" opens the door of limitless
possibility on the web. We can imagine everything from image
applications to video editing to office suites. Let's see how it will
change the web.