chrome-native://newtab/ | Google’s Native Client and Google Chrome

“chrome-native://newtab/“- Everything you should know about Google’s Native Client and Google Chrome. Hello everyone, I’m back with yet another Gossipfunda article to provide you with neat tutorials, tips, and tricks. This time I would like to talk about the chrome-native://newtab/ and Google’s Native Client. Native Client was very useful and revolutionary yet controversial for the web. It can provide to be very fruitful to gain some information about it. I’ll also knock around the topic of the Chrome browser, and some useful tips that will help when using it next time. I’ll try to dab around the different ways you can customize your chrome browser. Hope this article comes in handy for you and let’s begin.

Chrome is the most popular browser in the world right now and it doesn’t look like it’s gonna go down anytime soon. This is why to boost and expand its usage, Google developed the Chrome Native Client. Native Client first officially released in 2011, was developed to provide a platform to execute native C/C++ programs without any significant efficiency loss in performance. In this article, I will try to cover most things related to these topics giving you guys some tutorials as well.

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Google

In this day and age, I don’t think you’ll be able to find a single person who hasn’t heard the name “Google”. What began as a passion project for two Ph.D. students, today it is one of the highest-ranked and reputed companies in the world. Google search engine was found by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were studying for their Ph.D. at Stanford University in California. What made Google stand out from its peers was Larry Page’s own search engine algorithm known as PageRank which he co-wrote with Sergey. Currently, PageRank is not the only algorithm used by the search engine. After the company’s rapid growth in the early 2000s, it quickly expanded its ventures into other fields of IT as well.

Google started services like email services, work productivity utilities, instant messengers and video chat services, chrome-native://newtab/ and many others. Google Docs is one of the most used document processing tools used in the world due to its free nature. Similarly, Gmail is also the world’s most used email service. Google also owns and develops the world’s most used mobile operating system Android. It also developed a lightweight Chrome browser-based operating system known as ChromeOS. One of the most popular smartphone brands is Google Pixel and Nexus. Google has also tried starting to provide internet carrier services with Google Fiber, Google Fi, and Google Station. The world’s most used video streaming site and service Youtube is also owned and run by Google.

Even though Google is one of the world’s most valuable companies, it still has received a huge amount of criticism. The issues included privacy concerns, search neutrality, tax avoidance, and several other things.

Google although has many successful services that are used by millions of people, it is also accused of killing hundreds of service through mismanagement. The list of these services is so long that there is a website dedicated to it. You can find it here.

In 2015, during its restructuring, Google formed Alphabet Inc. as its parent company. At the time of writing, Sundar Pichai is the CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of both Google and Alphabet Inc.

Google Chrome

Google Chrome is the world’s most used web browser. Around 2004, the first rumors of the development of the Chrome browser appeared. During that time Mozilla Firefox was the hot browser that everybody was downloading. This convinced Google to hire some former Firefox developers to build up a prototype for Chrome. The development of the browser was led by the present CEO of Google Sundar Pichai. The browser officially came to a release in 2008. In 2020, it was estimated that Chrome had 70% of the total browser market. Since its release in 2008, Chrome had gained so much popularity that it was expanded into its brand. This led to the development of other products with the Chrome name such as Chrome OS, Chromebook, Chromecast, Chromebase, ChromeContinue, and several others. None of the other products became a huge success.

Chrome browser runs on the V8 Javascript engine as opposed to the Gecko engine that Firefox uses. The V8 JS engine was developed as a separate project in Denmark by Lars Bak (considered a Javascript genius). Most of the source code used by Google Chrome was derived from Google’s open-source web browser project known as Chromium. You can find its repository here. One of the most important aspects stressed during development was building a lightweight and fast browser. Chrome uses its minimalistic UI very well, giving maximum space for working while still providing all the customization settings for chrome-native://newtab/.

Even though Chrome is one of the fastest browsers out there, it has been heavily criticized by its users. This criticism mainly includes heavy power, CPU, and memory consumption compared to its competitor Firefox. This has led to many users migrating from Chrome to Firefox resulting in lowering Google Chrome usage in recent years.

Google Chrome, owing to its popularity, has been ported to a huge number of platforms. These platforms include Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS. Chrome browser comes pre-installed with every Android smartphone along with a large number of other Google apps.

Google Native Client

Google when developing ChromeOS, a Chrome browser-based operating system, had the aim to run web apps at their near-native speed. This would allow more application ports to the browser-based OS without worrying about performance and speed issues. This is why they developed the Native Client. Native Client (also known as NaCl or common salt) is a technology that allows in executing native C/C++ code at almost the same speed. To demonstrate NaCl and its powers, full-fledged Chrome-only versions of processor rich games like Bastion were released. It saw its initial stable release in 2011.

chrome-native://newtab/

You might have seen “chrome-native://newtab/” pop up before on your device. Users mainly report seeing this in the Google Activity section that stores most of the activities done on a smartphone. Should you be worried if this pops up? Most definitely no. This just a normal activity that was recorded when you were visiting the New Tab on Google Chrome on your device. There is nothing suspicious about it. Generally, URLs like chrome-native://newtab/, chrome://settings, chrome://version, content://com.android.browser.home/ and others are a way to access Chromes inbuilt pages.

Enabling Google Native Client

Enabling the Native Client or NaCl on the chrome browser is pretty easy, just follow these steps.

1. Open your Chrome browser.

2. Select the URL field and enter chrome://flags and press Enter.

3. This will open up the Flags tab.

4. In the search box, type “nacl”. This should bring up only the enable-nacl option.

5. Select Enable from the drop-down menu where it says Disabled.

6. A prompt to relaunch Chrome appears. Press the Relaunch button and Chrome will restart.

The next time Chrome restarts Native Client will be activated. You can view the full NaCl documentation here.

Customizing New Tab

Customizing Chrome’s new tab to a custom URL is not a backbreaking task. You just need to follow the steps below:

1. Again you need to open the Chrome browser.
2. Click on the three dots present in the top right corner of the window.

3. Select the settings option from the drop-down menu. 

4. From the sub-settings available on the left side, select On Startup.

5. Select the Add New Links radio button and click on Add New Page.

6. Enter the desired URL. I use duckduckgo.com as mine. 

This will set the entered URL as the new tab page and it will be the first page to open up when you start up Chrome.

See also: How to add chrome extensions on android or iOS

Some Android Chrome Tricks

This section talks about the android Chrome app. I will discuss some of the tricks that make operating the Chrome browser convenient on Android. Hope these come in useful to you as well.

• You can enable dark mode on chrome. This helps your eyes by reducing the amount of strain on them. All you have to do is copy and paste this line on your URL space chrome://flags/#enable-android-web-contents-dark-mode
• Changing one tab to another can become a chore. T to easily switch tabs on Chrome, you can simply swipe along the address bar.
• You can easily mute the sound playing on a website by just going to Settings -> Site Settings -> Sound. This is especially useful if a site has an auto-playing video.
• If you tap and hold on the tabs button then a secret menu appears allowing you to create or close new tabs more quickly.
• You can save pages as .pdf files for viewing them offline or for documentation purposes.  To do this: Three Dots -> Share -> Print -> Save as PDF.

Conclusion

So we’ve finally come to the end of this article. We have discussed in-depth about Google, Google Chrome, and Native Client. We also discussed the method to enable Native Client on your PC and tutorials to change the new tab page on Chrome. I also talked about the URL chrome-native://newtab/ which might appear in your activity area. I also shared some neat tips and tricks with you guys that might make operating Chrome a little bit easier.

Hope this article was helpful to you guys. If it was, do share it with your friends and families and stay safe out there. I’ll see you in the next article.