It took Google three years to add Firefox, Edge and Opera support to Google Earth
When Google unveiled the new Google Earth back in 2017, it switched Google Earth from being a desktop application to a web application. The company made Google Earth Chrome-exclusive at the time stating that the company's own Chrome browser was the only browser to support Native Client (NaCl) technology at the time and that the technology "was the only we [Google] could make sure that Earth would work well on the web".
The emergence of new web standards, WebAssembly in particular, allowed Google to switch to the standard supported by other browsers. The company launched a beta of Google Earth for browsers that support WebAssembly, Firefox, Edge and Opera are mentioned specifically six months ago.
Today, Google revealed that it has made Google Earth available officially for the web browsers Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based), and Opera.
Also at The Verge and Thurrott.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday February 28 2020, @12:10AM (9 children)
They may drop products left and right, but Google Earth is interesting. I would guess, also, popular. Which most of the dropped products, were not.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday February 28 2020, @12:57AM (7 children)
Google earth would have been a lot more interesting, if it wasn't a 64 gig installation, used 20 gig out of 24 gig of memory, ran half my processors to full throttle, and ate all my bandwidth.
Alright, I don't remember the exact numbers, but Google earth is definitely a resource hog. And, you don't want to install it if you're using a smaller (250 gig) hard drive as your / drive. Yeah, I know, storage is cheap, but still . . .
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday February 28 2020, @01:06AM (5 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth [wikipedia.org]
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2020, @03:09AM (3 children)
As the iOS installer should clue you in on, the Google Earth installer downloads a lot of data just to install. It also has a gigantic cache in your profile of all the various tiles and data you looked at while using it.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday February 28 2020, @10:20AM (2 children)
200 MB != 64 GB
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 29 2020, @02:00AM (1 child)
If you think the cache is 15 MB, I got a bridge to sell you.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday February 29 2020, @02:26AM
Show it to me with a KML file.
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(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday February 28 2020, @03:14PM
His complaints sounded a lot more like Google Earth VR requirements, but at that point, you should kind of be expecting a bigger footprint. He was definitely over exaggerating to the tune of 1000x for the standard Google Earth experience.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday February 28 2020, @04:10PM
Linux 1.0 (from the 90's) is an amazing resource hog that won't run on an Altair 8800 expanded to 2 K of memory. Even with a very expensive 4 K board you couldn't even boot Linux 1.0.
People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday February 28 2020, @12:58AM
Google Wave RIP.
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