Wayland-Based Chromium Browser Released

Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has done their first release of Ozone-Wayland, the new component that allows Google's Chromium web-browser to work natively on Wayland without any dependence on X.Org. Fedora and Ubuntu binaries are currently available.

Part of the Wayland team at Intel have been working on porting Chromium to Wayland via implementing an Ozone implementation. Ozone serves as Google's abstraction layer for Chromium/Chrome/ChromeOS to sit between different windowing systems / platforms. Ozone handles accelerated surfaces for the Aura UI framework, input handling, event handling, and other input/window tasks, with Ozone-Wayland implementing all the necessary function directly using the Wayland protocol rather than just running Chromium through XWayland.

Ozone-Wayland has advanced a fair amount through its development the past couple of months and now Intel OTC has declared "the release of the first Chromium browser built with Wayland graphics support. It is a preview version only though aimed for developers and will contain a lot of issues that we are hoping to track them together with the community."

Intel's team has made available 64-bit binaries for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and Fedora 19 while there's also instructions for other users to build Ozone-Wayland themselves. Intel developers will still do a few more releases of Ozone-Wayland, but after that they expect distribution vendors using Wayland to pickup their work.

More details on the first official release of Ozone-Wayland can be found at 01.org.