Forum Discussion
Google Earth also not supported in Edge Canary
pneenkoalabear For those of you who want to test https://earth.google.com/web/?beta=1, it is online and seems to work.
, the Google Earth normal ver however is still not working. Google hasn't backed off from their stupid Edge blockade yet.
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.
i don't know about your story...as nastyaaelisya mentioned, earth only checks for user agent, not browser capability. that's shady af
HotCakeX "i don't know about your story..."
I have no idea what that means, but the fact is that the "normal" (that is, current production) version of Google Earth for browsers uses PNaCl and the Google Earth beta uses WebAssembly. Google Earth for browsers does not run on mainstream modern browsers (e.g. EdgeHTML or Firefox), period, because modern mainstream browsers don't support PNaCl,
"earth only checks for user agent, not browser capability"
That may be, but since the current production version of Google Earth doesn't run on any mainstream browser other than Google Chrome (the only mainstream browser currently supporting PNaCl), checking the UA to see if the browser is Chrome (and not anything else) seems an efficient way to block users whose browsers won't run Google Earth before the browser tries to open Google Earth and crashes.
I have low opinion of Google. The whole Google ecosystem is an intrusive data-mining operation. I don't use Google products or services (Chrome, Gmail, Docs, Earth, YouTube, etc.) unless I have absolutely no alternative, either in the Windows environment or in the Linux environment. In short, I'm not a Google fan, and I think that users who uses Google products and services are opening themselves up for invasion of privacy. But in this specific instance, I don't think that Google is up to anything.