Google Earth doesn't load in Chromium

Question

Some minutes after going to https://earth.google.com/web/ in Chromium 62.0.3202.75 on Linux it still displays just "Google Earth" and a background image. The only issues in the network tab is that URLs https://people-pa.clients6.google.com/v2/people:batchGet?[…] and https://clients5.google.com/log?authuser=0 return HTTP 401. I won't use Chrome, and it doesn't yet support Firefox, so I'm kind of stumped.

1. Do I need to be authenticated to any Google services to use Google Earth?
2. Is Chromium not supported?

Answer 1

Besides you and me, many others reported that the new version doesn't run in Chromium. There was lot of complaining on reddit and hacker news when it happened in April 2017.

I found this Google Earth blog post from October 2017. They're porting the new Google Earth from their old binaries-on-the-web scheme, Native Client, to the newer standard WebAssembly. They talk about showing a demo running in Chrome, Firefox, and Chromium. They say "As WebAssembly’s threading support continues to grow in popularity with browsers, we look forward to launching in a browser near you!" They don't give a date.

(And tho maybe redundant, I can tell you that being logged in with Google made no difference. That was Chromium on Linux, too, but I really want to run it in Firefox.)