The Desktop: Frontiers in Systems Research

Desktop software, in the form of Web browsers, browser features and operating system distributions, are a growing area of engineering activity at Google. Brad Chen of Google, Inc. offers a look at Native Client as an example project in the space. Native Client is an open-source research technology for running x86 native code in Web applications, with the goal of maintaining the browser neutrality, OS portability and safety that people expect from Web apps. It supports performance-oriented features generally absent from Web application programming environments, such as thread support, instruction set extensions such as SSE and use of compiler intrinsics and hand-coded assembler. Google combines these properties in an open architecture designed to leverage existing Web standards and to encourage community review and third-party tools. Overall, Google’s desktop efforts seek to enable new Web applications, improve end-user experience and enable a more flexible balance between client and server computing. Google has open sourced many desktop efforts, in part to encourage collaboration and independent innovation. From the Series:CSE Colloquia - 2009