Microsoft help to bring Chrome to Windows 10 on arm



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Source: QualcommSource: Qualcomm

Windows 10 on Arm could get into … well … you know, courtesy of Google. The company would work with Microsoft to use Chrome on PCs equipped with Armient as a native application so that users no longer have to use an emulated (and less powerful) version of the browser.

Microsoft has been encouraging manufacturers to compete with Intel in the notebook industry for years. The latest initiative comes from the Windows 10 on Arm initiative, which encourages the use of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 and 850 processors, as well as other Arm chips.

Arm chips are expected to allow these laptops to save more power, better manage applications while they are asleep and connect more easily to cellular networks with Qualcomm's expertise in this area. These advantages, however, have their own drawbacks, the main one being perhaps that many Windows 10 applications have to be imitated, because developers have not released any version of their applications specifically for Arm devices.

Enter Google and Microsoft seem to work together to bring Chrome to Windows 10 on Arm. 9to5Google reported that Microsoft engineers had made "a few dozen commitments" for managing Chromium's Gerrit source code. According to the report, this could also improve the performance of "Electron-based applications, such as Slack and even Microsoft's Visual Studio code, and Node.js, which relies on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine".

These improvements would be a boon for Windows 10 on Arm device owners. But it's still a little surprising to learn that Microsoft is helping to bring Chrome to a version of Windows 10 in which it was not dominant. The company has become increasingly desperate to prove that its Edge browser can rival that of Chrome, even going so far as to annoy Windows Insiders with a pop-up window asking them to continue using Edge.

Putting these differences aside to make Windows 10 on Arm a more compelling experience shows Microsoft's commitment to the platform. The beginnings were difficult, especially since many of these devices came with a version of Windows 10 that was never supposed to support them, but at least the company seems to be passing on this initiative before wanting to promote Edge. (Call it "avoiding the double-edged sword", if you want.)

Microsoft and Google have not officially announced that a native version of Chrome is coming on Windows 10 on Arm. But the contribution of Microsoft engineers to the Chromium project shows that at least some people in the company want to improve the experience on these PCs always connected. Hopefully, people who embrace Microsoft's latest efforts to diversify Windows 10 devices will benefit.

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