Chrome team begins tinkering with Windows Mixed Reality support

Windows Mixed Reality headsets may eventually have another browser on board: Chrome. The Chromium development team has entered the very early stages of adding support for Microsoft's mixed reality platform to Chrome using the WebVR standard.

The evidence comes from a new commit (via 9to5Google) to the Chrome codebase that adds a flag to enable Windows Mixed Reality support. From the commit:

If enabled, Chrome will use Windows Mixed Reality devices for VR (supported only on Windows 10 or later).

As 9to5Google points out, the flag has been added as a build flag, which means it can only be enabled before building Chrome from source code. This points to actual support in the release version being a ways off, but it's interesting to see that the Chromium team is working on it.

This comes a little over a month after Microsoft's big reveal that it is rebuilding its Edge browser using Chromium as a base. The change won't involve a simple switch to the Blink rendering engine used by Chromium; Microsoft is planning to rebuild the entire browser using Chromium. This will allow Edge to be used on Windows 7, Windows 8, and, potentially, Mac. The switch will also let Microsoft update Edge at any time, separate from OS updates.

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Dan Thorp-Lancaster

Dan Thorp-Lancaster is the former Editor-in-Chief of Windows Central. He began working with Windows Central, Android Central, and iMore as a news writer in 2014 and is obsessed with tech of all sorts. You can follow Dan on Twitter @DthorpL and Instagram @heyitsdtl

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