http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/

Is it me, or this one looks like a serious flash killer? (And I actually hate when people use that [product]killer word combination).

Seriously... Specially now that Actionscript 3 has become quite dev-only thing. If google can make this one work, I can only see trouble for Adobe.

EDIT: I'm pasting here a email I've sent to the internal Hi-ReS! list which extends a bit this post:

Basically, this is a double kick.

First to Microsoft for trying to compete with Flash player by copying the worst side of it (scripting language).

Second to flash, because the whole community is always complaining how bad optimised the player is and how slow it is still compared to OS based applications. You know, compare flash earth with... redbull earth.

This is just opening a door to all the C/C++ Graphic programmers out there to the web. Letting them use what they know (C/C++) to create application/experiences/experiments viewable from any browser. (As long as they have the plugin and/or use Google Chrome).

Processing uses Java, and people that weren't happy (with flash performance) moved to Processing/Java in order to have richer visuals on the web. Java hasn't really been doing well online, the applet is annoying most of the time and takes a lot of time to load (and shows a ugly loader). This even beats that.

It is, of course, not going to be a night/day change, but I think this has way too much potential if they handle it well. I still don't know if it's sofware-rendering only.

And hey! They have Quake already, and flash (publicly) doesn't!