Oh, look. Google’s found another way to annoy the…to annoy Microsoft.

This one’s called Native Client, a shiny new open source R&D project aimed at running fast x86 native code in web applications.

It’s another way of going for the desktop’s jugular and, paired with Google Gears and Google Chrome, potentially a giant step for browser-as-platform.

According to a Google blog, it’s supposed to let web developers “access the full power of the client’s CPU while maintaining the browser neutrality, OS portability and safety that people expect from web applications.”

“If web developers could use all of this power,” Google muses, “just imagine the rich, dynamic experiences they could create.”

Some people think Native Client might be that Google webOS that Google groupies are forever talking about – or at least a piece of it. Others take it for a remake of Java or a JavaScript replacement or Google’s brand of ActiveX or a rival to Adobe’s Flash/AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight.

Here, in a nutshell, is the problem Google says it’s trying to solve:

“Imagine,” it says, “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.”

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