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posted by martyb on Thursday February 27 2020, @11:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the where-did-they-hide-all-the-turtles? dept.

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.

Google Earth.

Also at The Verge and Thurrott.


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  • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday February 28 2020, @12:10AM (9 children)

    by Freeman (732) on Friday February 28 2020, @12:10AM (#963874) Journal

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday February 28 2020, @12:57AM (7 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 28 2020, @12:57AM (#963883) Journal

    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)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday February 28 2020, @01:06AM (#963887) Journal

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth [wikipedia.org]

      Windows: 12.5 MB
      macOS: 35 MB
      Linux: 24 MB
      Android: 11.57 MB
      iOS: 185.6 MB

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      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2020, @03:09AM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2020, @03:09AM (#963923)

        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 Freeman on Friday February 28 2020, @03:14PM

        by Freeman (732) on Friday February 28 2020, @03:14PM (#964129) Journal

        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.

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        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

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 28 2020, @04:10PM (#964149) Journal

      Google earth is definitely a resource hog.

      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.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday February 28 2020, @12:58AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday February 28 2020, @12:58AM (#963884) Journal

    Google Wave RIP.

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