Chrome Is Reaching The Point Of Good X11 + Wayland Support In Same Build

Google's Chrome/Chromium web browser is finally reaching the stage where having both the X11 support and Ozone abstraction layer for Wayland can be enabled concurrently in the same build.

Thanks to the work by Google, Igalia, and others, the Chrome/Chromium code-base is nearly at the stage where the traditional X11 support can be built along with the Ozone platform support concurrently. Ozone is the platform abstraction layer being worked on for years for handling low-level input/graphics and necessary for Wayland support as well as various embedded use-cases and other platform abstraction capabilities. An overview of the Ozone code can be found here.

Toward the end of 2019 is when the Ozone Wayland back-end was considered beta with hopes of shipping in 2020.

This Chromium bug report from a week ago outlines that the X11 and Ozone support is nearly ready that both can be built for the same binary.

In that thread is talk of potentially introducing a new build flag for configuring the behavior as well as possibly a feature flag that could be enabled for a small percentage of users initially and the ability for Google to have a kill switch for it should something go awry when deployments begin. In any case, in the months ahead it looks like this will come to fruition for improving the Ozone/Wayland support.