Ever since last year, Google has been working on an open source project called Native Client, which is designed to run software applications downloaded from the web on x86 processors--running them natively, rather than within a browser. There are several advantages to running applications natively. For example, web-based applications rely heavily on JavaScript, and often technologies such as Flash, which are known to provide performance bottlenecks compared to the speed you can get when running applications natively.

Running downloaded applications natively also introduces problems, though, especially security problems. Nevertheless, Google has ambitious plans for Native Client, including Chrome integration. 

Google is out with an open source browser plugin called O3D that provides a JavaScript API for building and displaying accelerated, rich, interactive 3D applications directly within browsers. There is a demo video available here showing surprisingly good 3D graphics running on a Mac, and the plug-in works in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. In this blog post, Google makes clear that it is pushing O3D as a conversation starting point for "an open web standard for 3D graphics." Mozilla is working on open source efforts in the same space, and some surprises could come quickly from these efforts.