WebAssembly brings Google Earth to more browsers

[Arthur]

This means Google Earth will work in Firefox Quantum now.

 

Link: https://g.co/earth/beta

 

About 14 years ago, Google Earth gave users a rush of excitement by allowing them to zoom right in on their childhood homes. But that could happen only once they downloaded and installed the application. Earth was released as a native application because rendering the whole world in real time required advanced technologies that weren’t available in the browser.

 

As the Web progressed, we wanted Earth to be available on the platform so it could reach as many people as possible and let them experience the entire world at their fingertips. Web apps offer a better user experience because they’re linkable, meaning you can share access to the whole experience with a single click; they’re secure, since users aren’t at risk of viruses that can come with software downloads; and they’re composable, meaning we can embed them in other parts of the web.

 

In WebAssembly (Wasm), the W3C web standard for bringing native code to the web, the Earth team found a solution to allow Google Earth to move across multiple browsers—something we’ve been working on for a while now. Earth first came to the Web about two years ago using Native Client (NaCl), a Chrome-only solution—at the time. It was the only way to run native code in the browser and offer the performance users expect in modern web applications. But cross-browser compatibility is not as easy as we would like, since not every browser supports new technologies the same way.

 

Using WebAssembly, we see more possibilities not just for making apps more accessible across browsers, but smoothing out the online experience, as we’ve seen with Google Earth. You can check out the Earth preview beta to see what the Earth team has achieved and read about their technical implementation here.

 

Source: https://blog.chromium.org/2019/06/webassembly-brings-google-earth-to-more.html

[Arthur]