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Do you run the desktop edition of Raspberry Pi OS? If so, Google Chrome’s native Chrome for Linux Arm64 build may be welcome news. Google promised an Arm64 Linux version back in March, yet it never shared any progress afterward.
Now the company has quietly released the new build. Even so, it still offers no detailed announcement on its official site.
A User Found It by Editing the Download Link
The discovery came almost by accident. A user on Raspberry Pi OS, which is based on Debian, visited Chrome’s official download page. The page detected their system and offered only the amd64 version, and that build does not run properly on the Arm64-based Raspberry Pi.
So the user manually edited the architecture part of the download link. Surprisingly, the result was not an HTTP 404. Instead, the Arm64 download link actually delivered the new build.
DRM Support Enables Netflix and Other Streaming
Google had never shipped an official Linux Arm64 version before. The upstream open-source project, Chromium, did provide Arm64 support. However, Chromium cannot sign in to a Google account for data sync, so it felt like a half-crippled option for Chrome users.
The new Chrome for Linux Arm64 changes that. It offers account data sync, and crucially, it supports the Widevine DRM protection scheme.
DRM support matters greatly for a browser. Many sites, video services especially, use the mechanism to protect their content. Without DRM support, a browser visiting those sites may fail to play the video at all.
The implementation looks solid too. Chrome uses a native aarch64 build of the Widevine module rather than a compatibility layer. Therefore, users on Linux Arm64 desktops should find the new Chrome fairly convenient.
One caveat remains, though. Google has not announced any of this. Perhaps Chrome for Linux Arm64 has simply not reached a stable stage yet.
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