The 2020 State Of Wayland Support For Chrome/Chromium - Aiming For H2'2021 Default

At this week's virtual Embedded Linux Conference was a talk on Monday by Igalia engineer Maksim Sisov as to the state of native Wayland support for the open-source Chromium web browser and in turn Google Chrome.

For years the consulting firm Igalia has been involved in adding Wayland support for Chrome/Chromium by means of the Ozone abstraction layer underneath Chromium's Aura windowing system after Intel's earlier effort failed to get upstreamed.

Since last month Chrome/Chromium builds can be enabled with Ozone support via the run-time options of --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland/x11. These options work as of v87 Chromium builds.

With the current code most of the functionality is working fine on Ozone/Wayland but one of the temporary limitations is around tab dragging support, but that should be addressed soon.

Maksim Sisov noted though that these options are required with Ozone not being the default on Linux. They hope that in the second half of 2021 that Ozone will be the default on Linux and the legacy X11 code will be removed. The state of native Ozone X11 support for cleaning up the platform handling can be tracked via this Chromium bug tracker.

More details as to this current state of Chromium Ozone/Wayland support via this PDF slide deck from Maksim's presentation at this week's ELCE 2020 event. So next year this work might finally be wrapped up around Ozone/Wayland for a seamless out-of-the-box experience on Wayland with Chrome/Chromium.