Forum Discussion
Google Earth also not supported in Edge Canary
- tomscharbachJul 14, 2019Bronze Contributor
pneenkoalabear For those of you who want to test https://earth.google.com/web/?beta=1, it is online and seems to work.
- HotCakeXJul 14, 2019MVPYup, Google Earth beta is working with Edge Version 77.0.218.0 (Official build) canary (64-bit)
, the Google Earth normal ver however is still not working. Google hasn't backed off from their stupid Edge blockade yet.- tomscharbachJul 14, 2019Bronze Contributor
HotCakeX "Yup, Google Earth beta is working with Edge Version 77.0.218.0 (Official build) canary (64-bit), the Google Earth normal ver however is still not working. Google hasn't backed off from their stupid Edge blockade yet."
Although I despise Google, I don't think that it is a matter of Google blockading Edge Chromium.
The Google Earth beta uses WebAssembly, which modern browsers (e.g. Edge Chromium and Firefox) support, while the "normal" (that is, current production) version of Google Earth uses PNaCl, which is a depreciated, legacy technology that is not supported by Edge Chromium, Firefox or most other modern browsers.
All is not entirely well in the Google Earth world, however. WebAssembly is designed to be multi-threaded, enabled by SharedArrayBuffer (SAB), which was disabled in most browsers in the wake of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. Google Chrome uses uses SAB, but also uses site isolation to mitigate the risks. Other browsers (Firefox, for example) disable SAB, and Google Earth beta does not multi-thread in those browsers. I don't know how Edge Chromium deals with this issue.
I think that is is important to keep in mind that the Google Earth beta is (in the words of Google) "an experimental version" that is not yet fully functional. We'll see what happens going forward.
As a side note, opening the Google Earth beta in EdgeHTML (Edge Classic) gets this:
I don't know, but I'm thinking that this is probably related to the SAB issue.