From Google Blogoscoped:

Google has released something to the open source world they call the Native Client. It is meant as a way for website developers to execute rich code faster within the browser… by having it run “natively” on the computer. This could help any program needing fast graphics; a web-based photo editor might be one of the use cases of this, Google explains. Right now, as a developer you’re usually picking Flash or Java for that purpose. Google describes their efforts:

Following the guide in Ubuntu worked remarkably well. The result:

Nice, Quake in a browser. Note that this won’t work with any program, you’ll need:

• A Firefox plugin.
• The Native Client runtime.
• Special gcc compilation tools to compile your program to make it work with Native Client.

Still, this is a great idea, I’m curious which applications or tools (or games) this will spawn.