Most of Google's weird stuff makes sense in the long term. Google is big on making web apps, for example, so they have a serious interest in making web apps les

Most of Google's weird stuff makes sense in the long term. Google is big on making web apps, for example, so they have a serious interest in making web apps less painful. To that end: 1. They design a browser to make web apps more reliable and secure. One process per tab, plus fine-grained OS-level security. 2. In that browser, they introduce a JavaScript engine meant to make execution of JS a lot faster. 3. They continue to fund Mozilla, which is working on some of the same things, and may have a better approach to the JavaScript performance issue with TraceMonkey. 4. And now the Native Client. Theoretically its speed may even be surpassed by sufficiently good JITting of JavaScript (or whatever), but practically it will probably be pretty handy for some applications. It's nice to be able to get native speed now instead of waiting for a better JIT to be developed and deployed. About the only thing Google's spending serious money on that doesn't improve the environment for their money-making products is the Google Lunar X-Prize. And that can be justified by the sheer coolness of sending probes to the moon.