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By Stephen Shankland, 9 December 2008 15:21

NEWS

Rumours have abounded over the years about a Google operating system, perhaps based on the Ubuntu version of Linux widely used within the company, but on Monday the company revealed an open source project that provides a different answer to the same problem: Native Client.

According to Brad Chen of Google's Native Client team, the tech will give developers a helping hand without tying them to a particular browser or operating system.

"At Google we're always trying to make the web a better platform. That's why we're working on Native Client, a technology that aims to give web developers access to the full power of the client's CPU while maintaining the browser neutrality, OS portability and safety that people expect from web applications," he wrote in a blog posting.

Google has a three-lobed mission: search, ads, and apps. It does well on the first two, but web-based applications remain rough for most users. Native Client could change that if Google develops the project to maturity, convinces people to install it, and convinces programmers to write for it.

The software plug-in works in conjunction with various web browsers but lets web-based applications take advantage of a computer's significant processing horsepower. That puts it in a similar camp as Sun's Java, Microsoft's Silverlight, and Adobe's Flash, which, like Native Client, include a "runtime" foundation for running the software.

Although Native Client is just a research project at this stage, the move could have powerful long-term consequences for the battle to create the most compelling foundation for web-based applications. The technology philosophically meshes with Adobe's hybrid philosophy of running applications both on servers and PCs.

So far, Native Client works on Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome on any modern system with an x86 processor running Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux, Google said.