Google Earth finally works on Firefox, Edge, and Opera web browsers

This isn’t breaking news or anything, but after a long-time coming, Google Earth now works on web browsers other than Google Chrome. Meaning, you’ll be able to scan the earth to your heart’s content on either Firefox, Microsoft’s new Edge browser, and Opera.

Sadly, Apple’s web browser, Safari, wasn’t included in the mix, but support for that is coming later, according to Google.

Google Earth made its debut back in 2017, but at that time it was only available for Chrome browsers. There’s a lot of technical jargon why this was the case, but the gist of it is that it was only supported by Chrome-only sites. For the full explanation, Google details it out in a recently published blog post:

Since the initial launch of Google Earth on web; it has been accessible using the Chrome browser. This is because it was built using Native Client (NaCI), which was a Chrome-only solution. Back then, this was the only way we could make sure that Earth would work well on the web. Much has changed since that time and WebAssembly has emerged as the leading open standard, with browser support maturing greatly over the past few years.

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So yea, that’s about it. If you’re on a web browser other than Google Chrome and you’re looking to give Google Earth a spin, you can try it out here or by dropping this link in your URL bar: https://earth.google.com/web/.

Have any thoughts on this? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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Kevin Raposo

Kevin is KnowTechie's founder and executive editor. With over 15 years of blogging experience in the tech industry, Kevin has transformed what was once a passion project into a full-blown tech news publication. Shoot him an email at kevin@knowtechie.com or find him on Mastodon or Post.