[3] To demonstrate the readiness of the technology, on 9 December 2011, Google announced the availability of several new Chrome-only versions of games known for their rich and processor-intensive graphics, including Bastion (no longer supported on the Chrome Web Store).

NaCl runs hardware-accelerated 3D graphics (via OpenGL ES 2.0), sandboxed local file storage, dynamic loading, full screen mode, and mouse capture.

[6] The general concept of NaCl (running native code in web browser) has been implemented before in ActiveX, which, while still in use, has full access to the system (disk, memory, user-interface, registry, etc.).

On 12 October 2016, a comment on the Chromium issue tracker indicated that Google's Pepper and Native Client teams had been destaffed.

[12] Games such as Quake,[13] XaoS, Battle for Wesnoth,[14] Doom,[15] Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light,[16] From Dust,[17] and MAME, as well as the sound processing system Csound, have been ported to Native Client.

[18][19][20] Native Client has also been used to safely run downloaded code in software other than web browsers, like in the Dæmon game engine[21].

To run an application portably under PNaCl, it must be compiled to an architecture-agnostic and stable subset of the LLVM intermediate representation bytecode.

[24] The x86-32 implementation of Native Client is notable for its novel sandboxing method, which makes use of the x86 architecture's rarely used segmentation facility.

[25] Native Client sets up x86 segments to restrict the memory range that the sandboxed code can access.

It was used in Chromium and Google Chrome to enable the PPAPI version of Adobe Flash[30] and the built-in PDF viewer.

[35] As of 2020, Pepper is supported by Chrome, Chromium and Blink layout engine-based browsers such as Opera and Microsoft Edge.

[37] In October 2016 Mozilla announced that it had re-considered and was exploring whether to incorporate the Pepper API and PDFium in future releases of Firefox,[38] however no such steps were taken.

"[48] Mozilla's Christopher Blizzard criticized NaCl, claiming that native code cannot evolve in the same way that the source code-driven web can.