Google has realeased new software designed to let Web developers write more powerful programs that can work directly with an operating system, rather than having to be run through a browser. Called Native Client, the software was released under an open-source software license by Google engineers on Monday. It's still in an early stage of development, but Google says it could eventually help Web developers create Web programs that would run more quickly and feel more like desktop apps.

Developers could use Native Client to speed up a photo-sharing Web site, for example, so that users could touch up photos without ever leaving the site, Google spokesman Brad Chen wrote on a company blog. "Modern PCs can execute billions of instructions per second, but today's web applications can access only a small fraction of this computational power," he said.

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Google doesn't expect the software to be widely used just yet. "Native Client is a research technology so the goal of this release is to expose it to the research, security and open source communities for their feed-back and contributions," a Google spokeswoman said via e-mail. Native Client looks similar to Microsoft's ActiveX technology but will run on Linux and the Mac OS as well as Windows, Web experts said Monday. It also bears a resem- blance to an Adobe technology called Alchemy.

Developers create their code using a version of the GNU C Compiler, so that
desktop applications can be compiled to run on the user's PC using a special browser plugin.