Native Chrome arrives fashionably late to the Windows on ARM party
- Reference: 1706526073
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/01/29/native_chrome_windows_arm/
- Source link:
The update appeared as a Canary release, which could be unstable and full of bugs, but its arrival is a welcome development for Windows on ARM users waiting for positive news about the operating system.
There are browsers available natively for Windows on ARM, including Firefox and Microsoft Edge. However, others like the near-ubiquitous Chrome have required the use of Intel emulation, thus rendering many performance and power efficiency benefits of running on an ARM-based architecture useless.
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Versions of Google's browsers have long been available for Apple Silicon Macs, and Microsoft's ARM-native Edge is based on Chromium, so the reason for the lengthy wait is unclear. Also unclear is when the browser will turn up in the Chrome stable channel.
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We fired up our Windows on ARM device, a Windows Dev Kit 2023, to check it out. After the usual pain that comes from not having used the machine for a while – for some reason, ours loses track of time after a few days – we headed over to the Google canary channel.
After downloading and launching the browser, we found the usual plethora of Chrome.exe processes in the Windows Task Manager showing as Arm64 rather than x86 or x64.
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Google Chrome on Windows on ARM
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We'd be hard-pressed to notice a huge difference in performance between the emulation and the native version of the browser during our admittedly subjective tests. The ARM-native version seemed snappier, but other issues – for example, problems rendering the browser tabs – were unchanged. However, those are likely more to do with Microsoft's video drivers than the browser itself.
Being able to skip emulation should make for better power efficiency at the very least. The less emulation going on, the happier Windows on ARM appears to be.
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With a [10]possible push due this year to get more Windows on ARM devices into the world and a performance boost expected from [11]Qualcomm's next generation chips , a native version of Chrome will be greeted with a sigh of relief.
With Visual Studio and Office having also gone native in recent years, there is very little on our system that is still running in emulation mode. For many users – and vendors – a native version of the most popular browser in the world represents the final piece in the Windows on ARM jigsaw.
Once it hits the stable channel. ®
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Re: re : OS nobody cares about
As they teach in school these days:
“… that nobody cares about… YET”
Re: re : OS nobody cares about
The issue inevitably is the jump from one platform to the other. Apple has managed to get away with it because people accepted buying 2-or-3 updated applications that they would have bought the new version increment anyway (and Rosetta was a good enough stop gap, at least for some of the jumps). Rather more awkward in X86 land where folks routinely run 20 year+ old software that most definitely will not be getting a version bump.
I'm sure I have seen X86 successfully emulated on ARM, albeit with performance issues.
X86 is at an evolutionary dead end though at this point, going ever more parallel; giant slab sized silicon and ramping up power consumption that most users never touch isn't going to solve that.
It's had a good run. Time for a change?
Windows ARM vs x86
"to me, the writing is on the wall for Intel/AMD devices especially Laptops. When working all day is easily achievable with an M1 MacBook and that includes playing videos. If that is easy then why bother with I5 or I7 type devices."
It should be noted that x86 laptops tend to have longer runtimes and a generally better user performance when not running Windows.
Considering this, I wouldn't hold my breath that Windows on ARM is somehow more efficient than other OSes. The runtime might be better because of the ARM advantage, but the same hardware will most likely have better runtime and performance under a different OS there as well.
Re: re : OS nobody cares about
Of course. Because the OS is all that matters.
Never mind that 95% of all business applications are on Windows, that's just a detail. Let's switch everyone over to Apple and world peace will ensue, right ?
Nope.
Re: re : OS nobody cares about
95% of business applications are now online, essentially all Microsoft apps are online
If you are still depending on that 20year old stock control system written in VB for windows95 you might want to move that into a VM anyway
Its amazing how much of a big deal "an ARM version of a program is" on Windows.
On BSD / Linux, you just kind of expect it. Whether the C or C++ becomes Intel or Arm machine code out the other end is barely exciting.
I am surpised to took Google so long to get an Arm version of Chrome onto Windows ARM, unless they thought the user base was just too small to bother with the effort?
re : OS nobody cares about
to me, the writing is on the wall for Intel/AMD devices especially Laptops. When working all day is easily achievable with an M1 MacBook and that includes playing videos. If that is easy then why bother with I5 or I7 type devices.
Then (and yes, I know that it costs and arm (pun intended) and both legs) the M3 Max can be configured with 128Gb of RAM and 8TB of disk. It shows what is possible with the ARM architecture.
Apple make moving from X86 to Arm easy with their Rosetta tool. If another giant OS maker would think about doing the same then it would no longer be the OS that no one cares about.
but MS does seem to be afraid of taking the next step.
I'm done with X86.