An important day has finally arrived for those who are rocking Windows on Arm devices with Arm64 architecture like the Surface Pro 9 5G model or even the ThinkPad X13s. Google Chrome, which happens to be the world’s most popular web browser, now natively supports Arm64 processors on Windows, at least in the form of an in-testing Canary build. The news was first spotted by Chrome users.
One of the largest criticisms that many reviewers have placed on Windows on Arm devices is the fact that Chrome used to run under emulation on the platform. This often means that the performance of the browser wasn’t quite as strong as it is on devices with traditional x86 Intel or AMD processors. With native support for Arm64 processors now, this shouldn’t be a worry anymore, especially on media-heavy web pages.
It is important to note, though, that Chrome Canary isn’t a stable version of Chrome. It comes with bugs and lots of known issues, so this isn’t something we’d suggest running at the moment. Still, it’s nice to see because Chrome has long supported other devices with Arm-based chips like MacBooks, Chromebooks, and even Linux. Windows on ARM devices haven’t been as mainstream as those, and it’s possibly a reason why the company took a while to roll out Arm support to Windows.
There’s a new wave of Snapdragon X Elite powered Windows on Arm devices coming this year from all sorts of laptop makers, and this could be the reason why Google has finally had a change of heart. We expect the chip to be competitive with Apple’s M-series SoC, and even Intel’s Core Ultra CPUs. By rolling out support now, Google is getting ahead of the game.
You can download Google Chrome Canary right here. Minimum requirements include the Snapdragon 835 SoC.
