Support for Windows on Arm has been ramping up significantly in the past few months in preparation for the upcoming Snapdragon X Elite. Now, it's time for one of our favorite browsers, Vivaldi, to join the fray with its latest preview release. The news comes shortly after Google Chrome introduced support for Windows on Arm after years of holding back support.

Windows on Arm is finally being taken seriously

It's been an arduous journey for Windows on Arm since Microsoft introduced the project back at the end of 2016. Not a lot of apps run natively on Arm, and there hasn't been very exciting hardware, either, which resulted in a lac of consumer interest and fewer apps being developed.

However, things seem to be changing ever since Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon X Elite processor, which is coming later this year. For one thing, this is by far the most powerful Arm processor ever on a Windows laptop, outclassing most of the competition in its class. But it's also getting unprecedented support, both in terms of hardware and software. In fact, during the announcement of the processor, Qualcomm revealed that DaVinci Resolve, one of the best video editors on the market, would have an Arm-native version. That's very impressive.

Google Chrome added Arm support earlier this year, which was also huge considering it's the world's most popular browser. Google had been holding back support for years for no good reason, but even caved to the excitement surrounding the platform.

Vivaldi jumps on Arm (kind of)

Now, Vivaldi is joining Chrome and a wide range of browsers in supporting Arm devices. The latest snapshot release, which carries the build number 3329.7, adds experimental support for Windows on Arm. The development team does warn that the build is highly untested, with only one piece of hardware being used to run this early build, so you should probably expect some instability. But improvements should come in subsequent updates as the team gathers feedback and conducts more of its own testing.

While Vivaldi likely won't tip the scales either way, it's encouraging to see wider ecosystem support for Windows on Arm, which bodes well for the launch of Snapdragon X Elite laptops later this year. We're expecting many of these PCs to be announced at an event on May 20, so we don't have much longer to wait. In fact, we recently got our first look at one of these laptops thanks to a leak.