Google Chrome goes native for Windows on Arm | Hacker News Reader

Google Chrome goes native for Windows on Arm

theverge.com

77 pointsdoener55 comments

It seems like support is finally actually getting fully there for Windows on ARM. Native apps you have Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave, Photoshop and Lightroom, the Office suite, LibreOffice, Dropbox, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, .NET, VLC, Spotify, 7zip, Zoom... so many names, many of which are very recent to the list.

Of course there is still software missing native support (WhatsApp, Steam/most games, Slack, Adobe PDF reader) but the emulated support of both 32 bit and 64 bit x86 is there now so, so long as it doesn't have a kernel component (e.g. game anti-cheats), it'll actually at least run instead of "well, what version of x86 was that app?".

Combine that with the upcoming Snapdragon X Elite hardware and, supposedly, opening up to more than just Qualcomm and that it's an ARM Windows device won't necessarily have to be a bad thing anymore. The one last nut to crack is (ironically, for Windows) games. Until things like Fortnite are published with the ARM anti-cheat that'll be a big last snag which takes a while to clean itself up.

I just hope this won't eventually be the death of true device ownership. For all its cruft and flaws, x86 has served well as a standard platform for hackability and for alternative OSes like Linux to flourish on. Switching to ARM would give Microsoft and manufacturers an excuse to do away with all that.

I don't know what's the state of UEFI on ARM these days, but in a decade we could easily find ourselves in the same dire situation as phones, with a jungle of OEM-specific images, walled garden software and a boot chain cryptographically locked down.

All WoA (Windows 10/11 on ARM) devices based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7/8cx Gen 3 seem to allow disabling UEFI SecureBoot, AFAIK earlier SoCs did as well.

OpenBSD/arm64 runs on the Microsoft Dev Kit 2023 and Lenovo ThinkPad x13s machines, out of the box. OpenBSD supported booting/installing on these even before Linux, although Linux support has improved.

https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html

That's good news, as long as disabling Secure Boot doesn't put your device in a "no fun allowed" zone where it's cut off from banking, Netflix, etc. Like SafetyNet on Android.

I'm not aware of anything that depends on the SecureBoot status of a device, except possibly Widevine DRM for video streaming, but I don't see how that would be unique to ARM, disabling SecureBoot is also usually required on x86 for running alternative OSes without Microsoft's signed shim bootloader.

There is no Widevine support for OpenBSD anyway, so it's never been possible to watch Netflix. Fortunately, there are solutions for that...

Incidentally, Fedora Asahi Linux for Apple Silicon (ARM) got Widevine (hence, Netflix) working without any form of SecureBoot, they wrote about it recently on their blog.

One thing I know is the most invasive anti-cheat of them all: Vanguard. When you are running Windows 11 it requires secure boot to be enabled (IIRC this isn't the case for when running Windows 10).

On a different note, I actually learned a bit ago, that setting up secure boot with your own keys is not too hard if you are running a UKI, with only needing to sign systemd-boot and the kernel.

With your own keys, you mean adding your MOK (machine owner key), or going the entire way, with the Microsoft ones removed?

The first one is easy, the second one seems to be more complicated, especially if you have Option ROMs signed by the keys you would like to remove.

I mostly just let `sbctl` do its stuff automatically, but I do manually enroll my own keys and the Microsoft keys (when in Setup Mode), since they apparently might be required for some things to work correctly.

Linux-dedicated hardware is growing so I do think this will be avoidable. They might not be on ARM but they will likely still be sold and exist (unlike with mobile where say a Linux phone is unusable).

CrowdStrike also has an ARM version now. I recall reaching out to their support back when Apple M1 chips were out and finally get Windows 11 ARM virtualized and asking if they planned on an ARM client. At the time there was no demand but yes, it seems like ARM on Windows is headed in the right direction.

Can’t resist the urge to think Microsoft has their own silicon in the works.

This should also help with the performance of Electron apps like Slack and Discord since their Chromium-based, right?

Chromium and Electron have long supported ARM, since late 2019 or so IIRC. Google just hadn't published an official version of Chrome itself (which includes the branding, sync, widevine, etc). This is why Edge/Brave have had their own official ARM64 versions for years - the Chromium base already supported it.

Slack and Discord just choose to not publish ARM64 versions of their Electron apps.

Chrome already runs on android, and windows... Chrome on windows arm64 is just a compiler option away.

It's a bit more than that as you need to ensure that all of the platform specific code is cross-arch. So while the core is already ready there is tons and tons of I/O that will need fixing and testing.

They didn't already have a Windows ARM build? I know that ecosystem is immature but jeez, barely having Chrome on board >4 years after launching it is a dire state of affairs.

It’s obvious that Google intentionally withholds their software from platforms that could compete with their Android and ChromeOS devices (which are of course ARM-based).

They did the same to Windows Phone back in the day. Not having apps like YouTube left the platform at a clear disadvantage because they can’t be credibly replaced by third party clients (YouTube doesn’t tolerate them and will try to break them).

Is Microsoft also intentionally withholding software from Windows ARM? They only just shipped a fully native Visual Studio for ARM in December, four years after releasing the ARM-based Surface Pro X, and a decade after their earlier ARM push with the Tegra-based Surfaces.

Visual Studio had to wait for .NET Framework (not .NET Core) to be ported to ARM64 native.

Quite a part of Microsoft wanted to avoid doing that outright, so it took quite a while to happen.

I see https://imgur.com/XLuaF0h is as relevant as ever.

Google has supported ARM Chromebooks for years; if MS was shipping software for Darwin on Apple silicon or Linux on ARM then yeah that would be a weird look

Microsoft does ship ARM64 software for macOS and Linux though. E.g. .net core, PowerShell, and VS Code come to mind. Some of the Office suite ships ARM64 on macOS only as well (Teams, Word, Excel, Outlook, etc) and, back to the topic of browsers, Edge too of course.

Did every other developer also withhold apps from Windows Phone intentionally to prevent competition with their operating systems?

Besides Google and Snapchat most other platforms had apps (of varying levels of quality, though)

Yep, enjoyed getting banned from Snapchat for using a third party client on Windows Phone.

Snapchat would not allow a port no matter how much money Microsoft offered them.

How many people are there on windows arm? It doesn't seem super popular.

If anything, this looks like Google thinking that that might be changing.

Does anyone know if there are new windows arm products that might make it more popular?

I'm a very technical user, but my personal travel device is the Robo & Kala Surface alternative (bought for around $650 with detachable keyboard). Runs on ARM and handles emulation surprisingly well. What's super nice is that ARM Android apps runs seamlessly via Subsystem for Android, making travel easy since I can use the Android app for whatever service I want (Disney, Netflix, etc) and sync/download content in advance. I remote into more capable devices if I need additional horsepower, but it really is completely usable already.

It's not really happening yet but there's a renewed push to make it happen, with MS partnering with Qualcomm on a high performance mobile SOC that's meant to compete with Apples M-series SOCs, but it remains to be seen if OEMs will bite or just keep using the tried and true x86 parts. This isn't the first time MS has tried to make Windows ARM a thing.

I assume Microsoft will release a Surface or two with the new soc. Lenovo probably too since they released with the older qualcomm mobile SoCs. It all boils down to the actual real world performance of the new Soc, battery life etc.

Personally most software I run today would run fine on arm or it's web based so if the reviews look good I'm probably buying one.

> How many people are there on windows arm? It doesn't seem super popular.

> If anything, this looks like Google thinking that that might be changing.

I don't think you can necessarily interpret one of those to be the cause of the other; if anything, Chrome being supported might be a _necessary_ for the platform to get popular in the first place.

Yes, but it currently self-identifies as “32-bit emulated.”

> the choice of a native Arm browser on Windows is effectively just Edge

This is incorrect. Brave also has native Arm support, including Widevine.

Firefox on ARM64 Windows exists for years and I assume most who use Parallels on a Mac know and use it.

This is the only valid way of using windows, I guess

And Firefox as well if I'm not mistaken. On their download page, I can choose "Windows ARM64/AArch64" as platform: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/

There's also been a port of Chromium for years in addition to the Firefox port others have mentioned.

Both are probably better options than Google Chrome, which sole purpose seems to be tracking your browsing activity ;).

Based on the last time I opened Edge I'd say Microsoft is somehow beating Google on that count.

Not just you: https://www.zdnet.com/article/brave-deemed-most-private-brow...

I believe on MacOS the Chrome browser is also native ARM so I suspect this wasn’t a massive amount of additional work.

WebKit (Safari) diverged from Blink (Chromium) over a decade ago. The two codebase are very different now.

What does this have to do with WebKit or Safari? Chrome uses its own engine on both macOS and Windows regardless of CPU architecture, as well as all other supported operating systems except iOS and iPadOS.

Sorry I didn’t read your post correctly; I thought you said Safari.

Wasn't my post, but ok, misreadings happen, no worries.

It just shows how much of a disaster/uphill battle/impossible experiment (take your pick of which) "windows on arm" is.

A absolutely core piece of technology (I personally use edge/ff because I like to support the smaller options) but chrome is core on Windows.

The article title is "Surprise! Google Chrome goes native for Windows on Arm".

This is a non-story. For something as critically used as a web browser, being non-native would be the surprise, especially on the expected many lower-powered devices running the architecture.

Well that's the thing, it HAS been a surprise for many years at this point. Chrome has long supported ARM for Linux and supported ARM for macOS for a few years now but, while Chromium and derivatives have supported ARM on Windows for many years as well, Chrome itself did not leaving confusion or complication about how to deal with things like auto-updating, Widevine, and sync vs inefficiency via the x86 version.

The story is this has finally changed and that is more than a nothingburger headline.

> Chrome has long supported ARM for Linux

Really? Where we can downnload ARM build for Linux?

AFAIK, until now, only MacOS had arm64 build.

(Chromium is a different matter).

I don't know about "normal" desktop Linux, but there have been ARM Chromebooks for years

You won't find a generic .deb/rpm release (that I know of) if that's what you mean. Only the lacros-chrome version for Linux based ChromeOS.

As I understand then Chromium has had Windows arm version for 4 years and electron for 3

Linux arm native please, it will make my frontend testing a lot easier.

When arm64 native build… could use the cost reduction on AWS

Just use chromium?

Printer driver?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com