Enlarge (credit: Getty Images )

We are quickly barreling toward an age of viable Arm-powered Windows laptops with the upcoming launch of Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite CPU. Hardware options are great, but getting useful computers out of them will require a lot of new software, and a big one has just launched: Chrome for Windows on Arm.

Google has had a nightly "canary" build running since January , but now it has a blog post up touting a production-ready version of Chrome for "Arm-compatible Windows PCs powered by Snapdragon." That's right, Qualcomm has a big hand in this release, too, with its own press announcement touting Google's browser release for its upcoming chip. Google promises a native version of Chrome will be "fully optimized for your PC’s [Arm] hardware and operating system to make browsing the web faster and smoother."

Apple upended laptop CPU architecture when it dumped Intel and launched the Arm-based Apple Silicon M1. A few years later and Qualcomm is ready to answer—mostly by buying a company full of Apple Silicon veterans—with the upcoming launch of the Snapdragon X Elite chip. Qualcomm claims the X Elite will bring Apple Silicon-class hardware to Windows, but the chip isn't out yet—it's due for a "mid-2024" release. Most of the software you'll be running will still be written in x86 and need to go through a translation layer, which will slow things down, but at least it won't have to be your primary browser.

Enlarge / Google's not looking as good as it used to. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Don't let Chrome's big redesign distract you from the fact that Chrome's invasive new ad platform, ridiculously branded the "Privacy Sandbox," is also getting a widespread rollout in Chrome today. If you haven't been following this, this feature will track the web pages you visit and generate a list of advertising topics that it will share with web pages whenever they ask, and it's built directly into the Chrome browser. It's been in the news previously as " FLoC " and then the " Topics API ," and despite widespread opposition from just about every non-advertiser in the world, Google owns Chrome and is one of the world's biggest advertising companies, so this is being railroaded into the production builds.

Google seemingly knows this won't be popular. Unlike the glitzy front-page Google blog post that the redesign got, the big ad platform launch announcement is tucked away on the privacysandbox.com page. The blog post says the ad platform is hitting "general availability" today, meaning it has rolled out to most Chrome users. This has been a long time coming, with the APIs rolling out about a month ago and a million incremental steps in the beta and dev builds, but now the deed is finally done.

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  Chrome users will see this pop-up, telling them the ad platform has rolled out to them. [credit: Aurich Lawson ]

Users should see a pop-up when they start up Chrome soon, informing them that an "ad privacy" feature has been rolled out to them and enabled. The new pop-up has been hitting users all week. As you can see in the pop-up, all of Google's documentation about this feature feels like it was written on opposite day, with Google calling the browser-based advertising platform "a significant step on the path towards a fundamentally more private web."

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  The new Google Chrome Design.

It's Chrome's 15th birthday, and the browser is getting a big redesign to celebrate, or at least, it's as big of a redesign as you can do on a big, empty window to the Internet. Google's "Material You" design language is finally coming to Chrome stable (after some experiments in the past), and that means lots of rounded corners and pastel colors.

There has long been a "customize Chrome" button on the new tab page, but now when you open it you'll get a selection of Material You color swatches that look like they were ripped right out of Android. There is still a white theme if you want to ignore all that, though the default color now seems to be back to blue instead of gray, just like the early versions of Chrome. As previously promised , the SSL lock icon in the address bar has been replaced by a settings switch. The "Down arrow" tab menu has been moved to the left side of the browser (on Windows, at least). All of the text and icon line work has been tweaked to be thicker, and some things, like the bookmark folders, have totally new icons.

Everything has been rounded over. The top left and right corners of the toolbar are now rounded corners. The menu is rounded. The tab corners are even more rounded than they were before. And the Chrome window in the screenshots isn't even using the native OS UI—it's a totally custom window so that even the corners of the browser window can be rounded over. There isn't a single sharp edge on this thing.

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