Bringing Chrome to ARM64 Linux Devices

#1

Post by ingve » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 8:13 PM UTC

Bringing Chrome to ARM64 Linux Devices
blog.chromium.org

Re: Bringing Chrome to ARM64 Linux Devices

#2

Post by Hackbraten » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 8:23 PM UTC

Looking forward to no longer having to patch glibc on my Linux phone just so I can watch YouTube or use Spotify.

Re: Bringing Chrome to ARM64 Linux Devices

#3

Post by samtheprogram » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 8:42 PM UTC

I'm confused, how does Chrome work on ARM64 Android phones today?

Re: Bringing Chrome to ARM64 Linux Devices

#4

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 8:48 PM UTC

Curious; given that ARM Chromebooks are nothing new, I'm surprised that it took them this long to ship it to other Linux distros.

Re: Bringing Chrome to ARM64 Linux Devices

#5

Post by bloomca » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 8:56 PM UTC

samtheprogram wrote: post #3

I'm confused, how does Chrome work on ARM64 Android phones today?

Maybe Android has its own libc? So they compile it for Android, but not for general Linux.

Also curious about this.

Re: Bringing Chrome to ARM64 Linux Devices

#6

Post by westurner » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 8:58 PM UTC

samtheprogram wrote: post #3

I'm confused, how does Chrome work on ARM64 Android phones today?

What is necessary to run Linux ARM64 binaries on Android ARM64?

To run conda-forge arm64 Linux binaries on Android in termux requires proot-distro because the ABIs are slightly different FWIU.

What is necessary to run Android ARM64 binaries on Linux ARM64?

Android Studio, LineageOS or BlissOS's outdated Android containers, a runtime like vinegarhq/sober that emulates just enough of Android.

An Android binary that makes Linux compatible syscalls only (that doesn't require Android libraries that aren't compiled for Linux) won't work will it?

Re: Bringing Chrome to ARM64 Linux Devices

#7

Post by hugs » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 8:58 PM UTC

samtheprogram wrote: post #3

I'm confused, how does Chrome work on ARM64 Android phones today?

they probably meant desktop. i do browser test automation (selenium, vibium), and the lack of google chrome on arm64 trips up new users frequently. the workaround is to just use chromium, but that's a confusing extra step for some if it's not automated and hidden for you.

on that note, it would have been nice if they also clarified if this means they'll be shipping an official "chrome for testing" for arm64 linux, too.

Re: Bringing Chrome to ARM64 Linux Devices

#8

Post by westurner » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 8:59 PM UTC

bloomca wrote: post #5

samtheprogram wrote: post #3

I'm confused, how does Chrome work on ARM64 Android phones today?

Maybe Android has its own libc? So they compile it for Android, but not for general Linux. Also curious about this.

Android's libc is called Bionic.

Bionic (software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bionic_(software)

Re: Bringing Chrome to ARM64 Linux Devices

#9

Post by emilbratt » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 9:02 PM UTC

I have been waiting... so many years for this. Like, I figured it would never come. So happy to be wrong. Wonder if it will work well on Raspberry Pi and also if it will come with Hardware Video Acceleration out of the box.

Re: Bringing Chrome to ARM64 Linux Devices

#10

Post by eddythompson80 » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 9:02 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #4

Curious; given that ARM Chromebooks are nothing new, I'm surprised that it took them this long to ship it to other Linux distros.

Chrome had no official arm64 build. There are distro specific builds from debian, fedora etc for arm64 chromium, but google had no official arm64 build.

There were actually some paid services that provided a distro-agnostic chromium arm64 builds mostly targeting people running puppeteer on AWS ARM lambda. You can see some discussion here https://github.com/alixaxel/chrome-aws-lambda/issues/241

edit: I think I replied to the wrong comment.