Bringing Chrome to ARM64 Linux Devices

https://blog.chromium.org/2026/03/bringing-chrome-to-arm64-linux-devices.html

24•ingve•1h ago

Comments

Hackbraten•1h ago

Looking forward to no longer having to patch glibc on my Linux phone just so I can watch YouTube or use Spotify.

mort96•53m ago

Wait what, how is glibc patching related to YouTube and Spotify? Could you not watch YouTube using an arm64 build of Chromium or Firefox?

Hackbraten•18m ago

Spotify requires Widevine CDM to run, and Firefox doesn't come with Widevine on Debian-based distros. The .so hasn't been available on arm64 except for ChromeOS. You can rip the .so out of ChromeOS (that's what RaspberryPi OS did). But ChromeOS uses its own flavor of libc so a couple of patches to glibc are required.

Same thing with YouTube. A few months ago, YouTube started to require Widevine CDM if one uses the m.youtube.com site. I can't use the non-mobile site on my phone for performance issues, so I'm essentially locked into Widevine for watching YouTube, too.

cmrdporcupine•6m ago

Firefox pre-packaged for Ubuntu on my NVIDIA Spark has on problem with YouTube?

I guess it must be a snap, not a deb package, but... wouldn't that work?

samtheprogram•1h ago

I'm confused, how does Chrome work on ARM64 Android phones today?

bloomca•1h ago

Maybe Android has its own libc? So they compile it for Android, but not for general Linux.

Also curious about this.

westurner•1h ago

Android's libc is called Bionic.

Bionic (software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bionic_(software)

westurner•1h ago

What is necessary to run Linux ARM64 binaries on Android ARM64?

To run conda-forge arm64 Linux binaries on Android in termux requires proot-distro because the ABIs are slightly different FWIU.

What is necessary to run Android ARM64 binaries on Linux ARM64?

Android Studio, LineageOS or BlissOS's outdated Android containers, a runtime like vinegarhq/sober that emulates just enough of Android.

An Android binary that makes Linux compatible syscalls only (that doesn't require Android libraries that aren't compiled for Linux) won't work will it?

mort96•47m ago

A fully statically compiled Linux ARM64 binary which only interacts with the kernel through syscalls should run no problem on ARM64 Android. From the kernel's perspective, there is no difference between a "Linux binary" and an "Android binary" because the kernel in Android is Linux.

Most programs want to interact with various system libraries and system services though. Android and your typical desktop Linux system share pretty much nothing aside from the kernel.

westurner•41m ago

Why is it easier to run a Linux ARM64 binary on Android than to run an Android ARM64 binary on Linux?

My guess is that the reason is the same reason that there aren't official updated Android containers

mort96•36m ago

I don't know what you mean by an "Android ARM64 binary". If you make an ELF file containing ARM64 machine code, it doesn't matter to Linux whether you meant for it to run on Linux in an Android system, on Linux in a desktop GNU system, or on Linux in some environment with without much of a userspace at all (such as a stripped down initramfs environment).

If you mean something like an Android app, the answer is that there's a ton of system stuff that the app depends on, it interacts with more than just the kernel.

hugs•1h ago

they probably meant desktop. i do browser test automation (selenium, vibium), and the lack of google chrome on arm64 trips up new users frequently. the workaround is to just use chromium, but that's a confusing extra step for some if it's not automated and hidden for you.

on that note, it would have been nice if they also clarified if this means they'll be shipping an official "chrome for testing" for arm64 linux, too.

kelvinjps10•34m ago

Don't most people use chromium instead of chrome anyways on Linux?

hugs•31m ago

most people just click the "internet" button and use whatever was already pre-installed.

kelvinjps10•24m ago

I meant Linux users and chromium is the one that's already in the repos and doesn't need extra work. The default browser in most distros is Firefox

vinkelhake•44m ago

This is "just" about providing the official Chrome binary to ARM64 "desktop" Linux.

You've been able to build and run Chromium on ARM Linux for a long time (I'm running it right now), it's just that they haven't provided an officially branded Chrome.

This is a good thing. While Chromium works well, there are a few things (like syncing) that is a bit of a pain to set up.

hparadiz•43m ago

The Chromium project builds many things. The Android version is just one of those things.

yjftsjthsd-h•1h ago

Curious; given that ARM Chromebooks are nothing new, I'm surprised that it took them this long to ship it to other Linux distros.

eddythompson80•59m ago

Chrome had no official arm64 build. There are distro specific builds from debian, fedora etc for arm64 chromium, but google had no official arm64 build.

There were actually some paid services that provided a distro-agnostic chromium arm64 builds mostly targeting people running puppeteer on AWS ARM lambda. You can see some discussion here https://github.com/alixaxel/chrome-aws-lambda/issues/241

edit: I think I replied to the wrong comment.

emilbratt•59m ago

I have been waiting... so many years for this. Like, I figured it would never come. So happy to be wrong. Wonder if it will work well on Raspberry Pi and also if it will come with Hardware Video Acceleration out of the box.

mort96•40m ago

I would have more faith in Raspberry Pi's own patched build of Chromium to do hardware acceleration properly on the Pi than I would have in Google's generic Chrome build.

vsgherzi•36m ago

a lot of people seem to not understand what used to go into running chrome on arm64 devices, this blog goes over it pretty well

https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/netflix-on-asahi.html

kgwxd•23m ago

Nope. Make uBlock Origin work properly again, or gtfo of the browser market.

oofbaroomf•21m ago

Wait... weren't there many ARM Chromebooks already?

cmrdporcupine•8m ago

Sure, and when I worked at Google on Chromecast there was also that build of Chromium.

All of that is very different from The G actually provided a packaged official Chrome build, though. Which for some reason they couldn't be bothered to do before (Firefox exists though)

cmrdporcupine•6m ago

I recently switched to using an NVIDIA Spark as my primary workstation and lack of Chrome binaries for it are what finally pushed me to completely sever my relationship with Chrome and switch to Firefox.

Sorry, Google. Too late!

(Bonus: ad blocking properly works).

xupybd•3m ago

What is it like using a Spark as a workstation?

r2vcap•6m ago

Cool. Let’s release Android NDK for Linux arm64 host, too.

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Bringing Chrome to ARM64 Linux Devices

Comments

Shall I implement it? No

Malus – Clean Room as a Service

Bubble Sorted Amen Break

Reversing memory loss via gut-brain communication

ATMs didn't kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

Innocent woman jailed after being misidentified using AI facial recognition

The Met releases high-def 3D scans of 140 famous art objects

Runners who churn butter on their runs

Document poisoning in RAG systems: How attackers corrupt AI's sources

Bringing Chrome to ARM64 Linux Devices

Show HN: OneCLI – Vault for AI Agents in Rust

Launch HN: IonRouter (YC W26) – High-throughput, low-cost inference

Forcing Flash Attention onto a TPU and Learning the Hard Way

An old photo of a large BBS (2022)

WolfIP: Lightweight TCP/IP stack with no dynamic memory allocations

Converge (YC S23) Is Hiring a Founding Platform Engineer (NYC, Onsite)

Dolphin Progress Release 2603

Big data on the cheapest MacBook

Show HN: Axe – A 12MB binary that replaces your AI framework

Should hack-back be legal?

Show HN: Understudy – Teach a desktop agent by demonstrating a task once

US private credit defaults hit record 9.2% in 2025, Fitch says

The Road Not Taken: A World Where IPv4 Evolved

Are LLM merge rates not getting better?

NASA's DART spacecraft changed an asteroid's orbit around the sun

Full Spectrum and Infrared Photography

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