[mseebach]

It's really hard to create vendor lock in on a feature nobody uses.

But even if they did go down that route, NaCl is licensed under BSD, so even Microsoft could add NaCL to IE if they wanted to. That's some pretty weak vendor lock-in.

[espadrine]

Licensing is not the issue. Microsoft could not add NaCL to IE in the same sense that it could not add Firefox' DevTools to IE. It would require a major rewrite and cost tremendous heaps of money.

[mseebach]

Even if that's true (and I share the sibling's skepticism), vendor A's incompetence and poor product quality is not meaningfully described as "lock-in" to vendor B - especially so when there's a readily available vendor C (Firefox) that doesn't share these ills.

[rockdoe]

Firefox doesn't support NacCl, Mozilla has show no intention of integrating it and they even criticized the technology.

[IshKebab]

Yeah but that's because Mozilla loves javascript and NaCl provides a working alternative.

[stevehawk]

How is NaCl not just "Google's version of ActiveX"

[Niten]

Here's an overview:

http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...

[lallysingh]

NaCl runs in a sandbox

[spot]

it's secure and open source.

[simoncion]

I've gotta raise an eyebrow on that one. If it's a major rewrite to support a new plugin authoring language, your plugin architecture was a terrible mess to begin with.

Given that we're supposed to believe that New Internet Explorer was pretty much a from-the-ground-up rewrite, I can't imagine that their plugin architecture is a terrible mess.

[rockdoe]

NaCl isn't simply a plugin architecture. It is effectively the entire Chrome sandbox and large parts of Chrome architecture made available to binary plugins.

You aren't pulling it into your project without also pulling in half of Chrome.

[simoncion]

According to this [0], NaCl is a Pepper plugin. [1] This would strongly imply that all you'd need to do to use NaCl is to implement PPAPI. Care to point out how I'm wrong about that?

[0] https://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/getting-started/gettin...

[1] Indeed, in a vaguely-recent Chrome, about:plugins has this to say about NaCl:

Native Client

Name: Native Client

Version:

Location: /opt/google/chrome/internal-nacl-plugin

Type: PPAPI (in-process)

[pilif]

the PPAPI is very closely tied to chrome's inner workings and is extremely complicated to implement as, compared to the old plugin api's, it doesn't allow native code any access to the local system. So it needs to provide plugins with all the possible hooks they will ever need.

Check https://developer.chrome.com/native-client/c-api for a list of currently supported features.

For other browsers to support PPAPI, they'd have to implement all of this, which, btw, also is a moving target that moves forward in lockstep with chrome releases.

[mortehu]

> the PPAPI is very closely tied to chrome's inner workings and is extremely complicated to implement

I've looked at the API, and can't agree with your statement. The API is similar to a typical game engine API. There are classes for handling input devices, audio, OpenGL, hardware video decoding, filesystem access, and basic networking. The PPAPI does not even touch the DOM, so it's not tied to being in a web browser.

[kelnos]

NPAPI (the old plugin architecture) is a terrible mess. It's 20 years old as of this year, and was cobbled together by Netscape back for version 2.0.