Microsoft is developing a new version of its Edge web browser based on Google’s open source Chromium project. That means it uses the Blink rendering engine instead of EdgeHTML, has a user interface that’s more than a little reminiscent of Google Chrome, and should be able to render any web pages that work in Chrome.
It also means that if Microsoft is serious about supporting Windows on ARM, the company needs to port the browser to run on computers with ARM chips and not just Windows 10 machines with Intel and AMD processors.
And that’s exactly what Microsoft is doing. In fact, the company says it’s not only going to make the new Chromium-based version of Edge available for Windows on ARM, but Microsoft is working with Google to allow Chromium to run natively on Windows on ARM devices.
That means that not only will the new Chromium-based Edge browser be available for Windows on ARM in the future, but you should be able to install third-party browsers, assuming their developers compile them for ARM architecture.
Chromium 73 and later should be compatible with Windows on ARM, which means they’ll run natively without requiring any sort of x86-to-ARM emulation.
While Google Chrome is probably the best known web browser based on Chromium, here are a few other somewhat popular Chromium-based browsers:
Developer Jeremy Sinclair reports that he was already able to build a version of Chromium for ARM64 and run it on an Asus NovaGo laptop with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor and Windows 10 on ARM software. Here’s a short video showing the browser in action:
As you wish. pic.twitter.com/kDrQ9TP8DC
— Jeremy Sinclair (@sinclairinator) April 8, 2019