With the helpful—artful one might say—contribution of Randy Fay, the ongoing staying power of my chrome-headless docker containers live into the linux/arm64 architecture age with the release of the chromium tag. This tag lives it’s own branch in the dockerfiles repo very similar to the Chrome release branches tracking that I use in the repo and Docker hub.

This isn’t without issues. For starters, Debian is all kinds of behind with Chromium in terms of the mainline. This isn’t exactly new—Chromium on Debian has always somewhat been a gamble, but the move to six week release cycles and deps problems really put the nail in that coffin—but it seems to have reared it’s ugly head more in the last few weeks, culminating in a post of Phoronix about the overall sad state of browser support on Debian no less. Yikes.

Even in the build that’s pushed to Docker Hub, I had to move from bullseye to buster-slim because of problems with qemu and libc which surfaces in buildx.

So, while this build will work with your fancy M1 Apple silicon, buyer beware: you’re way behind on the Chrome features and more importantly security side of things. Use caution and if you run into problems, file bugs on the repo.