SOLVED

ETA for ARM / Snapdragon support of Edge Chromium

Iron Contributor

Not sure if this has been asked before, but is there an ETA for an ARM compatible build of Edgium? The 32bit version works in emulation mode, but ARM native would be much faster and more power efficient. 

 

The original Edge mostly works on ARM, but it is painfully slow on YouTube (blame Google), and doesn't support custom searches, both of which are a regular pain point for me. Edit: Edge Chromium on ARM is also sorely needed for the Surface Pro X!

 

Edit: it's here, in fact it's been here for a while. I think it should auto install if the installer detects an ARM system, correct me if I'm wrong. 

38 Replies

There is a Telegram channel that is releasing the newest builds of Edge Chromium for x86, x64, and ARM. I have been running it on my Galaxy Book2 for a while now with no ill effects. It is super smooth and much faster than the x86 builds. All the usual "not an official build, try at your own risk" blah blah blah applies.

 

Edit: Also, looks like January 15th is the target date for an official ARM64 Edge Chromium build.

https://t.me/MSEdgeUpdates

Let's hope that date doesn't get pushed back.

Meanwhile the Office team really need to get Office on ARM sorted.
Does anyone know where twitter user ADeltaX gets his ARM64 Edge builds? He uses a bot to post links to - presumably - freshly compiled exe files, but I'd rather get them directly from Microsoft. It seems like a bad idea to install executables posted by a third party!

If this was a response to my question, I know where to find his exe links, but I wonder if there's an official page (e.g. MS Git page? Disclosure, I don't know what I'm saying). ADeltaX sounds like a nice guy, but installing exe files from an unknown location is kind of bad practice!

Awesome thanks a lot for that Telegram! My Snapdragon 850 Laptop is getting smoother every day now! Firefox ARM64 (official beta) and now also EdgeChromium ARM64 (unofficial Telgram beta), nice!

@ChromeRefugee yes please save us Microsoft! :lol:

 

Also, whatever the holdup is with getting Google's official Chrome on ARM64, I hope they do the drinking, or whatever needs to be done behind the stage for this to become available sooner if possible.

 

https://www.neowin.net/news/chrome-for-windows-on-arm-is-ready-but-google-isnt-releasing-it/

 

And yes, we really need MS Office on ARM64, why isn't that made yet? And if Qualcomm/Microsoft could award developers some kind of support money to help them speed up porting all the most important apps to ARM64 that would be nice. Like I hope to see the complete Adobe app suite available on ARM64 as soon as possible.

 

A $1000+ Microsoft Surface Pro X is not helping much with that though. We need to see these SQ1/8cx laptops come out now at sub-$500 as soon a possible.

@Charbax  Neowin published an article yesterday where ARM64 build was mentioned:

https://www.neowin.net/news/microsofts-new-edge-will-ship-without-arm64-support-history-sync-and-ext...

 

"The reason for the lack of ARM64 support is a blocking bug that is exclusive to the ARM architecture. Microsoft did indeed plan to announce support for the chip architecture at its October 2 event alongside of the ARM-powered Surface Pro X, but it just wasn't ready, and it's still not ready. ARM64 support is definitely coming though, just in case anyone was worried."

 

I guess there is some windows related bug with ARM64 chromium, search by keywords shown this

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=893460

Daniel Rubino over at Windows Central sounds mighty peeved about the absence of even a canary version of Edgium on ARM for the Pro X, see this article. He's not mincing words.. :suprised:

 

Notably, he's claiming that the versions floating around the internet (I'm thinking via the Telegram channel) work quite well, so without further clarification of what those show-stopping bugs are I agree that it's inexplicable and frustrating that we can't install this through an official method. 

 

 

@ChromeRefugee I may sound like a conspiracy theorist, but my theory is always that it has something to do with Intel, Intel has huge clout and even giant companies like Google, Microsoft and Adobe are at the mercy of Intel's constant threats, maybe Intel threatens Microsoft with promoting Ubuntu or other Linux, maybe Intel threatens Google to remove discounts on Xeon server chips, maybe Adobe is threatened by Intel some other way. I say this because Intel has behaved like that for decades, and surely they see these Arm Windows 10 laptops as a major threat. Officially Intel has already threatened to sue everybody over the emulation that's happening in these. Even though Intel has had to emulate Arm on every Intel Android device shipped thus far.

@Charbax Yeah, I don't know if it's intel, but when you have a compiled Canary version obviously available, it's hard to come up with a reason for NOT releasing this to willing testers. It's even harder to come up with a reason that MS wouldn't be willing to verbalize! The fact that they quietly hold back a usable Canary version makes it seem like they have a legal/IP issue. 

@ChromeRefugee Intel's behavior is completely illegal but they don't care, the anti-trust bureaus never do anything about it. They threaten and others use Arm the way they always do, they use it as some kind of leverage, trying to pressure Intel on yet more discounts either they "might" go with a totally non-Intel alternative. The industry should have moved over to Arm over a decade ago but all these machinations have held this obvious change back.

@Jerasadar 

 

Thanks for linking the Telegram channel. I just installed it - and it is running great even on my older HP Envy X2 - really smooth.

Makes you wonder why there is no official beta or canary version available from Microsoft? I mean a beta program is there in order to iron out all the bugs - so the explanation about a bug holding the beta release back does not sound reasonable to me.

I'm glad it helped. I've seen speculation here and elsewhere that there may be a legal reason Microsoft hasn't released this officially yet. Technically this build works as well as any other Chromium build and I've found no real bugs, so I'm inclined to believe there is another issue such as with the GIT or something else.

@Gerdi444I have a Huawei Matebook E (2019). I'm very interested to try the Edge for ARM beta.

 

I'm currently using Firefox ARM but it's Firefox, it's not quite as snappy as Chromium browsers are. Standard Edge is okay but not very feature rich.

...and finally, just late enough to make sure reviewers of the Pro X got a bad first impression, it's here: Edge Chromium for ARM in the Canary channel. Better late than never I guess! 

 

Now why the heck has the team been so quiet on release dates for ARM builds?!

 

@ChromeRefugee  Did they take this down?  I don't see a way to select ARM on the Canary or any of the other channels.

@Mike719 Not as far as I know. The Stable channel includes an ARM build for WOA devices. If you install Edge from the official download page, it should automatically install the ARM version if you're installing on an ARM system. Once you run it, there's a way to check if it's the ARM version in the Task Manager, see here.

Yes I use the Edge ARM64 every day, works great. They pushed it out after this thread. There still isn't a Google Chrome for ARM64 though?? There is a holdup there which I really don't like. The Chrome browser on ARM64 is so slow and unstable. Edge ARM64 is great but as far as I can see it can't synchronize data/passwords/URLs and etc from Chrome, why not? Just have some kind of deal to synchronize all the data with Chrome and all will be totally fine on the ARM64 world. Now that Apple finally also has woken up to ARM, and Google is making their own ARM chip for Chromebooks, hopefully this is shortly going to further improve.