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by mortehu 4014 days ago
While there's "almost no third party adoption", there are two pretty significant uses: The Flash player and the PDF viewer. Browsers that rely on NPAPI for these get all of Adobe's security bugs on top of their own. You may say that Flash and PDF doesn't exist in your view of the web, but it definitely does for many people.
2 comments
jug 4014 days ago
It does, and I enjoy mp4 videos and I'm not bothered much by DRM on Netflix either, but should a component like NaCl implying a binary blob be part of an open source software.. by default? Feels weird to have it included with Chromium by default. Weren't Chrome and Chromium originally separated in order to make one compatible with open source distributions, so that this sort of thing would be avoided? A conflict with Debian sounds like a pretty big one.
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strcat 4014 days ago
NaCl doesn't imply proprietary any more than a JavaScript engine does. The downloaded code is bytecode at an abstraction level a bit below C but quite a bit above assembly. It's not substantially different from a freedom perspective than code compiled to asm.js or just minified JavaScript. Both are usually proprietary and require reverse engineering work to decipher.
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vezzy-fnord 4014 days ago
As it's not the "preferred form of the work", I think it is proprietary - same way any object/intermediate or obfuscated code would be.
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rockdoe 4013 days ago
>NaCl doesn't imply proprietary any more than a JavaScript engine does

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html

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diamondlovesyou 4013 days ago
> The downloaded code is bytecode at an abstraction level a bit below C but quite a bit above assembly.

You just described PNaCl, not NaCl. NaCl is architecture specific and already sandboxed (ie the SFI part of NaCl), whereas PNaCl is not.

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cpeterso 4014 days ago
Chrome's Flash Player uses PPAPI (Pepper), not NaCl. Pepper Flash is still running Adobe's native code, not NaCl code.
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mortehu 4013 days ago
Aha, I see it's a shared object. It's sandboxed, though, so quite similar to NaCl.

Both NaCl and the plugins are running native code. NaCl is not PNaCl.

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rockdoe 4013 days ago
So it's using the NaCl sandbox and interface without the bytecode parts?
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cpeterso 4013 days ago
As I understand it, NaCl is a Pepper plugin, but Pepper does not rely on NaCl. Other Pepper plugins are not necessarily using NaCl.

https://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/wiki/Pepper

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