Native Client Chrome Integration

[David Sehr]

Last week we made a small step in integrating Native Client with the browser by adding it to the Google Chrome Developer Channel behind a command line flag. 

Until now, using Native Client from a browser required installing an NPAPI plugin. This was the right choice for our research release; however, NPAPI plugins have limitations in terms of how they interact with the browser and other web technologies. So, we've taken a preliminary step toward removing these limitations by building Native Client into the developer channel of Google Chrome.

Native Client is disabled by default when you run Google Chrome.  To enable it, start Google Chrome with the --internal-nacl and --no-sandbox command line switches. Currently, using Native Client requires disabling the Google Chrome sandbox.  This is related to a bug that we expect to fix soon, but for now, we recommend running Google Chrome with this flag only for testing Native Client and not for regular web browsing.  For more information on using Native Client in Google Chrome please visit http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/wiki/NativeClientInGoogleChrome.

Enjoy!

Gregory Dardyk, Software Engineer and David Sehr, Software Engineer