Google today uncovered a new project the company is pursuing called Native Client that “make it possible to build applications that run in a web browser but incorporate native code modules,” according to a post on the company code blog.

The project, though still in the early stage, promises to let Web-based programs access far more computational power on computers than they do now.

This is probably Google’s answer to Adobe’s Flash, Sun’s Java/JavaFX, Microsoft’s SilverLight and even to Windows as a platform for web application development. “…we believe that the ability to safely run fast native code in a browser has the potential to provide benefits to users and developers,” said Google in the post that also gave an example in which theoretically Native Code can do better than traditional way:

For example, imagine that you run a photo-sharing website and want to let your users touch up their photos without leaving your site. Today, you could provide this feature using a combination of JavaScript and server side processing. This approach, however, would cause huge amounts of image data to be transferred between browser and the server, leading to an experience that would probably be painfully slow for users who just want to make a few simple changes. With the ability to seamlessly run native code on the user’s machine, you could instead perform the actual image processing on the desktop CPU, resulting in a much more responsive application by minimizing data transfer and latency.

Native Client, like its name implies, will provide a sandbox for portable, untrusted x86 native code as illustrated in the documentation.

The project is opened to community asking for help from developers and security researchers to address some core challenges.

According to Google, Native Client currently works on Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome on any contemporary system with an x86 processor running Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux.