back to article Chrome for Windows-Arm laptops officially lands in time for Snapdragon X Elite kit

The first official release of Chrome for Windows-on-Arm laptops is landing this week, in time for this summer's Snapdragon X Elite-powered notebooks running Microsoft's operating system. Until recently Windows-on-Arm users have either had to run the Google browser on x64 emulation (and take whatever performance hit that …

  1. DoContra
    Angel

    Surely the main driver/benefit for the native build is power efficiency? (And also low-hanging fruit for M$ marketdroids to exploit in device-tailored adshighly important and informative notifications).

    My actual question is when GNU/Linux compatibility with this new crop of devices :)

  2. Russ T

    Edge is better than Chrome, though.

    It sips memory compared to Chrome, and power too.

    Dare I say it, MS made a half decent product.

    1. Jason Hindle Silver badge

      Re: Edge is better than Chrome, though.

      Chrome has had some nice improvements recently. Automatically sleeping unused tabs, for example, reduces its memory footprint.

  3. ldo Silver badge

    Windows-on-ARM Continues To Be A Slow Trainwreck

    No non-x86 port of Windows has ever been successful. I expect Microsoft continues to lose money on the effort even today.

    1. Andrew Hodgkinson

      Re: Windows-on-ARM Continues To Be A Slow Trainwreck

      I think you're at risk of being very wrong, but perhaps from very right experiences - a long time ago.

      Win11 ARM is a very slick beast, as Windows goes. The x86 layer hasn't skipped at beat even for Steam and games, *and* that's from the perspective of a VM on Apple Silicon, so there are a few layers of things that could go wrong in the way.

      It's about time Apple got some competition - along with Intel and AMD too, for that matter. The tired, overheated, blustery laptops of today are about to get a wake-up call. About time too!

      1. ldo Silver badge

        Re: The x86 layer hasn't skipped [a] beat

        I’m sure they’ve got it working reliably, but the value proposition is missing. If you have to resort to running emulated x86 code, then what happens to the much-vaunted greater efficiency of ARM? It’s gone.

        1. doublelayer Silver badge

          Re: The x86 layer hasn't skipped [a] beat

          It depends how often you have to use it. If most of your tools are compiled for ARM, then you will be efficient most of the time and the emulation is there when you need to run something that wasn't compiled for it. The trouble comes if most of what you want to do hasn't been compiled over and you spend most of your days in emulation. For people who use niche tools, it's probably not ready. For the average office computer where a word processor, email client, and browser are needed, you can likely find ARM versions of all those things. Definitely if you're using Office for those, but Firefox and LibreOffice have Windows on ARM ports as well. I don't have one, but I think it has avoided the reasons why I told people not to consider earlier attempts. The Windows RT devices may have looked like Windows, and there was some Windows source code in there, but they didn't have compatibility with anything Windows had. The current version does have that, and from what I've heard from people who use it, it works pretty well.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Windows-on-ARM Continues To Be A Slow Trainwreck

      Windows NT was successful on the Alpha. Microsoft only dropped Alpha support when Compaq killed off the processor.

      1. ldo Silver badge

        Re: Microsoft only dropped Alpha support

        You’ll notice that Linux did not drop Alpha support at the same time; it continued for quite a few more years. The same happened with Itanium.

        The fact that Windows stands no chance on anything less than a wildly successful CPU architecture is just reinforcing my point.

        1. doublelayer Silver badge

          Re: Microsoft only dropped Alpha support

          I'm not really sure what that proves other than that Microsoft is quicker to drop support. The hypothetical of what would have happened had Alpha remained in production and being purchased is the better one, but we don't know whether Microsoft would have kept it, whether people would have bought it, or any of the questions relevant to the ARM situation today. Windows on Alpha and Itanium were already weak because people weren't buying the machines with those chips in them. You can't really blame Windows for Itanium's failure when Linux shops weren't buying Itanium boxes in droves either.

          1. ldo Silver badge

            Re: Linux shops weren't buying Itanium boxes in droves either.

            Nevertheless, it was enough to keep Itanium support in Linux for a decade or more after Microsoft had given up.

            Open Source does a much better job of supporting multiple architectures than proprietary software can manage. This is why Windows-on-ARM simply cannot get traction.

            1. Sandtitz Silver badge

              Re: Linux shops weren't buying Itanium boxes in droves either.

              "it was enough to keep Itanium support in Linux for a decade or more after Microsoft had given up."

              Plain wrong. Windows Server 2008 (R2) was supported on Itanium until 2020.

              1. ldo Silver badge

                Re: Windows Server 2008 (R2) was supported on Itanium until 2020.

                I’m not talking about continuing to sell the product, I’m talking about continuing to offer updates for it.

                1. Sandtitz Silver badge

                  Re: Windows Server 2008 (R2) was supported on Itanium until 2020.

                  "it was enough to keep Itanium support in Linux for a decade or more after Microsoft had given up"

                  "I’m not talking about continuing to sell the product, I’m talking about continuing to offer updates for it."

                  I'm not talking about sales either.

                  Microsoft dropped Itanium support in 2020. Until then MS offered updates for the Itanium version of Windows 2008. Linux kernel dropped Itanium with 6.7 - kernel 6.6 will be EOL in 2026.

                  The difference (2020-2027) in support is less than decade, so how did you come up with the 'decade or more after Microsoft had given up' quote?

                  Itanium failed miserably and both Linux and Windows could have dropped support even earlier for all I care...

                  1. ldo Silver badge

                    Re: decade or more after Microsoft had given up

                    Because their later releases of Windows Server for Itanium no longer had version parity with the x86 version. By contrast, Linux support for Itanium remained comprehensive until the end.

    3. Jason Hindle Silver badge

      Re: Windows-on-ARM Continues To Be A Slow Trainwreck

      Looking at the performance of ARM Windows 11 hosted by Parallels on my Mac, I'd say both it and the x86 emulation are very good.

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