Chrome Lands on ARM64 Linux, a Decade Late and Just in Time

Google shipped official Chrome builds for ARM64 Linux this week — stable channel, Widevine DRM included — and did it without a press release, a blog post, or even updating its own download page, which still hands ARM users an amd64 installer. The .deb is sitting on Google's servers regardless (the RPM too), and it installs and runs on Raspberry Pi 5, Snapdragon X laptops, and Apple Silicon Macs running Asahi Linux. After macOS got ARM Chrome in 2020 and Windows in 2024, the last major platform gap just closed. Quietly.

Chromium was never the problem

Let's be precise about what was missing, because "Chrome couldn't run on ARM Linux" was never true. Chromium has shipped in aarch64 distro repos for a decade — Raspberry Pi OS bundles it, Debian, Fedora, and Arch all build it. What you couldn't get was the proprietary layer: Google account sync, and above all Widevine, the DRM module that Netflix, Spotify, Disney+, and half the paid web require.

The workaround was one of desktop Linux's longest-running hacks: extracting Widevine blobs from ChromeOS recovery images and grafting them into Chromium. Those blobs were 32-bit armhf builds for years, which got progressively more painful as the ecosystem went 64-bit — Raspberry Pi OS's default arm64 userland, Asahi's pure-aarch64 world. An entire class of ARM Linux machines simply couldn't play licensed media without multilib gymnastics or giving up.

The new build ends that. It ships a native 64-bit Widevine CDM in /opt/google/chrome/WidevineCdm/_platform_specific/linux_arm64/ — an official, supported artifact rather than a scavenged one. Temper your expectations, though: it runs software-secure (L3), the same as Chrome on x86 Linux, because there's no hardware-backed trusted execution path. Streaming services cap L3 playback at 1080p at best, often 720p. That's parity with Intel Linux desktops, not a downgrade — but no 4K Netflix on your Pi.

Follow the silicon, not the community

Why now, after a decade of Pi owners asking? Read Google's March announcement closely: the launch partner isn't the Raspberry Pi Foundation, it's NVIDIA. Google is integrating Chrome directly into the package feed for the DGX Spark, NVIDIA's Grace-Blackwell desktop AI box that runs Linux on ARM and costs about as much as a used car.

That's the tell. ARM Linux desktops stopped being hobbyist curiosities and started being where well-paid engineers spend their workday: DGX-class AI workstations, Ampere dev machines, Snapdragon X laptops that increasingly run Linux well, Asahi Macs. Google supports platforms when the users on them have budgets, and the AI build-out put money behind an architecture the Pi community couldn't. The Pi 5 owners get to ride along — a fine outcome, but let's not mistake it for Google discovering the SBC market.

What changes for you

If you develop on ARM Linux hardware, adoption is one command pair:

wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_arm64.deb
sudo apt install ./google-chrome-stable_current_arm64.deb

That also registers Google's apt repo, so updates arrive with everything else — the real difference from the blob-extraction era, where DRM broke on every Chromium major bump.

The bigger deal is testing. Until now, "test on Chrome" was impossible on ARM Linux CI: GitHub's arm64 hosted runners (free for public repos since early 2025) could only offer distro Chromium, which diverges from real Chrome in codecs, DRM, and update cadence. An official stable-channel Chrome makes ARM-native browser CI legitimate. Expect Chrome for Testing binaries and first-class Puppeteer/Playwright support to follow — neither could offer real Chrome on this platform before, and that gap is now Google's to close rather than yours to work around.

Web developers targeting kiosk, signage, and embedded deployments — a huge share of real-world Pi usage — get the most immediate relief. Those fleets could standardize on actual Chrome with actual Widevine instead of maintaining Chromium-plus-blob images that needed re-validation every release.

Adopt for dev, wait for the paperwork

The honest caveat: this is a soft launch, and it shows. Google hasn't announced availability, Chrome's support pages don't yet list ARM64 Linux as a supported platform, and the download page doesn't detect ARM systems. Early reports peg the build at version 150 on stable, but until Google updates its support matrix, you're running something official-but-unacknowledged.

So: for your personal machine, your Pi projects, your CI experiments — install it today; it's the browser you've wanted on this hardware for ten years. For anything with an SLA — enterprise fleets, customer-facing kiosks — wait for Google to formally list the platform, because "supported" is a contract and Google hasn't signed it yet.

But make no mistake about the direction. This is a genuine shift, not a checkbox. The last first-class desktop platform without first-class Chrome just got it, and the reason — ARM moving from the margins of Linux computing to its best-funded center — isn't reversing. The decade-long era of scavenging DRM blobs out of ChromeOS images is over. It ended not because anyone at Google finally heard the Raspberry Pi community, but because NVIDIA started selling ARM Linux boxes to people with budgets. Take the win anyway.