Microsoft has been selling Windows 10 and Windows 11 PCs with ARM chips instead of x86 processors for years now, but there are still many popular applications not ported to ARM, including Google Chrome. That is finally changing.
Google announced today that Google Chrome for ARM Windows PCs will start rolling out this week. The next major Chrome update isn’t due until April 16th, so the ARM version will seemingly roll out as an update to Chrome 123, which arrived last week. The browser will now run natively on ARM Windows computers, such as the Surface Pro X, Samsung Galaxy Book 2 Go, and Surface Pro 9 5G.
The new ARM version is (unsurprisingly) faster than previous versions of Chrome on ARM Windows devices, which had to be translated from x86 to ARM instructions in real time. Google and Qualcomm didn’t offer any specific test results, though, only saying it “provides a dramatic performance improvement over previous versions.” Presumably, it’s about as fast as other Chromium browsers that were already native on Windows ARM PCs, such as Microsoft Edge.