Google Earth will support all Chromium-based browsers

Google today announced that Google Earth Web Edition will eventually support all other Chromium-based browsers. The company announced the news today in a blog post. Google used the Native Client (NaCl) technology only for Google Chrome. The company has now added support for WebAssembly, which will support all Chromium-based browsers. However, only Chrome supports WebAssembly’s multithreading, which means there is a performance difference between Google and other browsers. The good news is that Chromium-based Edge does support WebGL, so Edge performs better than classic Edge and other browsers.

Chromium-based browsers, including the Chrome browser, the upcoming Chromium Edge and Opera-all support WebAssembly (some with multiple threads, others not). Once a new Chromium-based Edge is released, the application in WebAssembly works the same way as it does in Chrome.

“Google Earth”by labnol is licensed under CC BY 2.0

The Firefox browser provides good support for WebAssembly, but due to the SharedArrayBuffer issue, you have to disable support for multithreading. Although Opera is based on Chromium, the current version of Opera only provides single-threaded support for WebAssembly. Safari has a powerful WebAssembly implementation, but it lacks full support for WebGL2.

On the other hand, Mozilla is working on multithreading support. Mozilla, Google, and other companies removed SharedArrayBuffer to protect users from Spectre vulnerability and crashes. Google brings support for site isolation to Chrome to prevent Spectre vulnerability and crashes and has enabled SharedArrayBuffer in the process. Firefox does not currently have site isolation, so currently you cannot run SharedArrayBuffer.

However, Mozilla is working to provide support for site isolation, which should allow them to enable SharedArrayBuffer and support multithreading of WebAssembly.