Google Native Client
software
Google Native Client (NaCl) is a discontinued sandboxing technology for running either a subset of Intel x86, ARM, or MIPS native code, or a portable executable, in a sandbox. Google Chrome and other Chromium-based web browsers incorporated NaCl to safely run native code within web apps and browser extensions, largely independent of the user operating system and at near-native speeds. This capability was imperative for Google's plans for ChromeOS as a general-purpose computing platform. NaCl was also used for securing browser plugins, like Adobe Flash Player, and parts of other applications or full applications such as ZeroVM.
The general concept of NaCl (running native code in the web browser) has been implemented before in ActiveX, but NaCl runs content in a sandbox while ActiveX application has full access to the system (disk, memory, user-interface, registry, etc.). Mozilla proposed asm.js as an alternative to both ActiveX and NaCl. asm.js also allows applications written in C or C++ to be compiled to run in the browser and also supports ahead-of-time compilation, but is a subset of JavaScript and hence backwards-compatible with browsers that do not support it directly.
In 2016, Google de-prioritized feature development for Pepper and Native Client. On 30 May 2017, Google announced deprecation of PNaCl in favor of WebAssembly. Over the following years, Google Chrome slowly deprecated and removed NaCl on different platforms. ChromeOS version 138 became the last Google platform and version to support Native Client until July 2025 with the release of ChromeOS 139 dropping support for Native Client.
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This entry incorporates text from “Google Native Client” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.