Google Announces End of 32-bit Chrome Web Browser for Linux Users

If you like Linux, Google Chrome and 32-bit computing, you won’t be happy come March 2016. Google will cease supporting its Web browser for 32-bit Linux distributions in that month, according to a recent announcement.

On Nov. 30, developers of Google Chrome announced, “we will end support for Google Chrome on 32-bit Linux, Ubuntu Precise (12.04), and Debian 7 (wheezy) in early March, 2016.”

They added that Chromium, the open source browser based on Chrome, should still support 32-bit architectures after the change. But Chrome itself, Google’s official browser, won’t.

One Chrome user wrote in response to the news, “farewell Chrome! If I can not use the same browser on all my platforms, I will not use it at all. Firefox might be slower, but it works on my old 32bit-only laptop.”

However, most users of desktop Linux distributions, like Ubuntu and Fedora, are unlikely to care much about this news. 64-bit architectures have been common on most systems for about a decade, and users can update from 32-bit to 64-bit environments easily enough if they haven’t already and really want to use Chrome.

They could also alternatively use a browser that still supports 32-bit platforms, like Mozilla Firefox. And it will probably be possible to use an emulator to run 64-bit Chrome on a 32-bit system, if you really want to do that.

Still, this news is another sign of the slow demise of 32-bit x86 computing. Linux users have long enjoyed the option of sticking to 32-bit builds if they wanted to. Sometimes, 32-bit has been simpler because certain proprietary applications (Adobe Reader, I’m looking at you) are not available in 64-bit form for Linux. The opposite is now becoming true.