During this era, the Chrome Web Store was flooded with "Packaged Apps"—offline-capable applications built on NaCl technology. It seemed as though the future of computing was a thin-client OS running NaCl apps.
Despite its power, the NaCl web plug-in faced a significant hurdle: . While Google Chrome leaned heavily into NaCl, other major browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Apple’s Safari were hesitant to adopt a technology so closely tied to Google’s infrastructure. nacl-web-plug-in
Today, when developers search for nacl-web-plug-in , they actually want . This is not a "plug-in" in the traditional sense, but a self-contained .wasm module that acts as one. It runs at near-native speed inside the JavaScript sandbox with no installation required. During this era, the Chrome Web Store was
While the original NaCl was architecture-specific (x86), the paper discusses the goal of portability, which eventually led to the development of Portable Native Client (PNaCl) using LLVM bitcode. Research at Google Current Status Deprecation: Native Client has been largely deprecated and replaced by WebAssembly (Wasm) While Google Chrome leaned heavily into NaCl, other