Pixel Picture Clearer? Google Ports Office-Substitute To Chrome OS, Browser

CWmike writes "Google confirmed on Tuesday that it has ported part of QuickOffice to a technology baked into Chrome OS and the company's Chrome browser. The popular iOS and Android app substitute for Microsoft Office that Google acquired last year will run using 'Native Client,' a technology that lets developers turn applications written in C and C++ — originally intended to run in, say, Windows. With that it will execute entirely within a browser, specifically Google's own Chrome. Google claims that Native Client code runs almost as fast inside the browser as the original did outside. QuickOffice viewers come bundled with the $1,300 Chrome OS-based Chromebook Pixel notebook, and Google will add editing functionality in the next two to three months. Does this all make the Pixel make more sense?"

Comments

Re:Everything old is new again

[shutdown -p now]

The big difference between ActiveX and NaCl is that the latter has a sandbox - a very smart one, actually, which lets it run native code directly while remaining secure.

The other big difference is that they are also tackling the architecture portability issue by the PNaCl project (basically downloading LLVM bitcode and compiling it for the current architecture).

So, yes, this is like ActiveX - but done right. All the perf of native code with none of the security issues.

I really, really hope it catches on - especially PNaCl. If it does, we can finally ditch JS as the web client language, and move on to something more decent (and better yet, you and me can make different choices about the languages that we want to use).