Google Earth now supports all the Chromium based browsers

Google, today announced that Google Earth will finally support all the other Chromium-based browsers. The company announced the news in a blog post (via Techdows) today explaining the changes made in the background to enable the support.

Google earlier used Native Client (NaCl) technology which was limited to Google Chrome. The company has now added support for WebAssembly which will support all the Chromium-based browsers. However, only Chrome supports Multi-Threading of WebAssembly which means that there would be performance differences between Google and other browsers. The good news is that Chromium-based Edge does support WebGL so the performance will be better on Edge compared to the classic Edge and other browsers.

The Chromium-based browsers—including Chrome, the forthcoming version of Edge, and Opera—all offer support for WebAssembly (some with multi-threading, others without). Once the new version of Edge based on Chromium ships, apps in WebAssembly will work as well in Edge as they do in Chrome. Firefox offers good support for WebAssembly, but had to disable support for multi-threading due to a SharedArrayBuffer issue. And while Opera is based on Chromium, the current version of Opera only offers single-threaded support of WebAssembly. Safari has a strong implementation of WebAssembly, but it lacks full support for WebGL2.

– Google

Mozilla, on the other hand, is working on the multi-threading support. Mozilla, Google and others removed SharedArrayBuffer to prevent users against Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. Google brought support for site isolation to Chrome in order to prevent Spectre and Meltdown and enabled SharedArrayBuffer in the process. Firefox currently doesn’t have site isolation so it can’t run SharedArrayBuffer at the moment. However, Mozilla is working on bringing support for site isolation which should allow them to enable SharedArrayBuffer and support multi-threading of WebAssembly.