Chrome 31 Lands Portable Native Client (PNaCl)

Written by Michael Larabel in Google on 3 October 2013 at 02:36 PM EDT. 4 Comments
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Chrome 30 was just made stable this week but Google has already released the Chrome 31 Beta. There's several user-facing changes for Chrome on Android while in the desktop version the major change is the arrival of Portable Native Client.

Portable Native Client is Google's approach to running native code within web-browsers. C/C++ code is compiled into an LLVM bitcode that can then run across all desktop versions of Chrome and Chrome OS without any program installation and the entire application is in a sandboxed environment. For those not familiar with Google's open-source Native Client, many more details are available from the technical overview page.

Chrome for Android with version 31 gets support for application shortcuts and payment requestAutocomplete() support for more easily filling out online forms. The initial requestAutocomplete() interface will allow for web developers and users to more easily handle web payments from Android devices.

The Chrome 31 Beta also features new Chrome Apps APIs, SCTP support for the WebRTC Data Channel to allow P2P data file transfers, alpha channel support for WebM videos, speech recognition support with the JavaScript WebSpeed API, an ellipse method for the 2D canvas, and various other developer changes.

More details on today's Google Chrome 31 Beta can be found via the Chromium blog.
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