Google Chrome Is Being Ported To Wayland

Besides the exciting news last week that KDE has drawn up plans for Wayland in 2012, there's more good news in the land of this next-generation display server: the Google Chrome/Chromium web-browser is being ported to run on Wayland.

Beginning last month on the Wayland mailing list there was some activity by a Chromium contributor (example) named Daniel Nicoara. His messages have continued and just this afternoon submitted a new patch to fix Wayland's incomplete frame-buffer attachment on GTK when using the latest GTK3 tool-kit.

Wayland contributions from a Chromium e-mail address isn't too informative by itself, but when digging a bit deeper is when the situation becomes more interesting.

In this Google Code thread, Nicoara mentions, "I'm working on adding Wayland support for Chromium." This was in a message for the ANGLE project, which is the Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine. This is Google's project for running WebGL by translating OpenGL ES 2.0 API calls into DirectX 9.0 API calls for Windows users.

While talk is one thing, Daniel Nicoara is actually committing this support. If doing a search on his Chromium email address, all of his recent commit activity has been about getting the open-source version of Google's web-browser working on Wayland.

There's already a basic Wayland tool-kit that wraps around the Wayland library, Wayland support for the UI/GFX with creating the OpenGL surface and context support, and other work. This work has also been discussed among Google's other developers.

It would be interesting to see Google's Chromium/Chrome web-browser soon working on this Wayland Display Server. At least it would be a much more interesting and useful demo than the simple Wayland demos available currently or the limited usefulness of most GTK/Qt applications right now.

Making things more interesting is if Google has any aims of potentially running a Wayland Display Server for their Chrome OS operating system. That has yet to be communicated or seen, but Wayland would seem like a great fit for the web-focused operating system, sans any graphics hardware driver issues. Google's already using the Intel Gallium3D driver in their Chromebooks and has worked on this unofficial driver upstream. Let's wait and see.