Hacker News Reader

It isn't for you. It is for the person who can open a tab, but doesn't want to run a full client. Installation, sandboxing, laziness, etc.

A university or corp could push a tab open script to thousands of desk tops, while they wouldn't push Folding@Home client.

It's not an incredibly common use case, but many computers exist simply to show a dashboard or visualization. It would be excellent to say "drop this script tag on your page" and you instantly turn that Mac Mini into less of a waste.

A fair number of people are already running the Chrome NaCl client in their browsers but it is CPU only.

http://folding.stanford.edu/nacl

Chromebooks?

Those are pretty woefully underpowered for folding..