Google engineers themselves haven’t been energetically pursuing Wayland support within the Ozone abstraction layer for the Chrome/Chromium web browser but thankfully the consulting firm Igalia continues pushing this native Wayland support along. Nick Yamane with Igalia has out a new blog post covering the remaining items being addressed.
It’s 2025 and while much of the Wayland support in open-source projects has been settling nicely, there still isn’t native Wayland support enabled by default in the Chrome/Chromium Ozone code. But remaining items are being addressed and for many use-cases/hardware is very much in usable form.
Igalia engineer Nick Yamane who has been working on this code thanks to sponsors summed up the current Ozone Wayland state as:
“It’s been a few months since Chromium Wayland backend has started to be tested as the main browser backend by Google employees, through a finch trial experiment, as well as internally at Igalia. Feedback collected since then is quite positive in general. The exception is Nvidia setups, which, depending on the driver version, may face major regressions (see Explicit Sync section below for more details).
While official roll-out has been under discussion, it’s still disabled by default on Linux Desktop. Early adopters willing to test it are encouraged to explicitly opt-in by flipping the ozone-platform-hint chrome flag to auto or wayland.”
There has been new Ozone Wayland work around fractional scaling, input method handling, tab dragging, full UX support within GNOME’s Mutter, text scaling, explicit sync handling, and more.
Those wanting to learn more about the current Chrome/Chromium Ozone Wayland state can read Nick’s blog post for all the details in full.
