After roughly seven years of Windows on Arm PCs being on the market, Google is finally releasing a version of Chrome that's optimized for them. The native browser has been available in the Canary channel since January.

"The new version of Google Chrome will help cement Snapdragon X Elite's role as the premier platform for Windows PCs starting in mid 2024," said Cristiano Amon, President and CEO, Qualcomm Inc. "The PC industry is on the cusp of an inflection point, and as we enter the era of the AI PC, we can’t wait to see Chrome shine by taking advantage of the powerful Snapdragon X Elite system."

It's a big deal

WOA users won't have to use Edge anymore

I'm pretty sure I've reviewed more Windows on Arm devices than anyone, and the general theme always ends up being that the product is pretty good, as long as you're planning on spending the bulk of your time in Microsoft's Edge browser. Firefox went native a while back as well, but for a long time, that was it. Other browser-makers blamed Google for not supporting Arm with Widevine. Chromium has been native for Arm for about five years now, thanks to Microsoft's contributions when it rebuilt Edge on the open-source browser.

Google Chrome changes the game. It's the most popular web browser in the world. Telling people that they shouldn't use it on a particular type of product is just going to send them to buy something else.

The performance improvements are significant. Even with the latest hardware, I don't recommend running Chrome in emulation, but in my testing with Speedometer 2.0, the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s (Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3) scored 62 in emulation, and 103 when running natively. That's a 66% boost.

I also got to test it out on Qualcomm's 25W Snapdragon X Elite reference design unit, and the difference was even more significant. The two scores were 164 and 406, so that's more of a 2.5x boost. Browsers are harder to emulate because a lot of what they do can't be cached, so it's no surprise to see a much better experience from one that's running natively.

Why did it take so long?

Only Google knows

I reported back in 2019 that Google has a native Chrome browser ready to ship, but it wasn't releasing it yet. Back then, I had heard it would take another year, and when I pressed, someone told me, "Think Amazon Prime and Chromecast support." In other words, these big tech companies play their games, and when they come to an agreement, that's when we'll finally see the product.

I have no idea if the Mountain View firm has been maintaining an Arm version of its browser for that long, or if it was something it had and then scrapped, but it certainly seems that the upcoming Snapdragon X Elite was the catalyst for finally making this happen. Indeed, it's a very exciting time for Windows on Arm, and it seems like this is finally going to be the time that Microsoft and Qualcomm get it right.

We're less than two months away from product launches now, and I'd expect to see more software optimized by then.