The key premise of this article is unsubstantiated by the provided link. The article states, "Unfortunately, Google has recently announced that they will expose Portable Native Client (PNaCl) --- and by extension, the Pepper APIs --- to all Web pages"; all the article's complaints are based on this description and the assumption that it will be exposed to all web pages without first being standardized.
But this claim is misleading; the closest the announcement page that is linked from the article [1] comes to supporting it is saying "Once PNaCl is fully released, users will be able to run PNaCl modules on any web page". It does not state an intent to transition PNaCl to this "fully released" state at any particular time in the future, or without standardization.
> Once PNaCl is fully released, users will be able to run PNaCl modules on any web page – applications will not need to be deployed through the Chrome Web Store in order to run PNaCl modules.
NaCl has always been enabled only in the Store, and not on the web, while the news in that announcement is that it will be enabled on the web.
If you still think that isn't clear, watch the recent Google IO PNaCl talk, where this is stated as well,
> NaCl has always been enabled only in the Store, and not on the web, while the news in that announcement is that it will be enabled on the web.
...when PNaCl is fully released. Which is what they've said for years, that they weren't turning any Native Client on for the web until PNaCl was ready to be "fully released". So that wasn't actually the news.
The actual news was the announcement that PNaCl execution is supported (not that PNaCl will be "fully released") from Chrome 29, which was, at the time, the Canary version of Chrome (its since moved to the Dev channel.) Prior to Chrome 29, the only way to run PNaCl code -- or rather, code that had been generated by the PNaCl toolchain -- in the browser was to run it through another tool which generated regular, architecture-specific NaCl code.
I understand it is possible to read those announcements in that way. It seems a bit of a stretch (look at how things are phrased in the video). But again, I hope you are right.
There are plenty of Google people reading HN, hopefully they can quickly confirm things one way or the other.
> It does not state an intent to transition PNaCl to this "fully released" state at any particular time in the future, or without standardization.
Per the GoogleIO PNaCL talk, their goal is to have this out with Chrome 30. Even ignoring the impossible time horizon, let's not kid ourselves that there's any will to standardize this thing.
But this claim is misleading; the closest the announcement page that is linked from the article [1] comes to supporting it is saying "Once PNaCl is fully released, users will be able to run PNaCl modules on any web page". It does not state an intent to transition PNaCl to this "fully released" state at any particular time in the future, or without standardization.
[1] https://developers.google.com/native-client/announcements (the relevant announcement is the May 15, 2013)