Chrome on Desktop to Finally Support Native HLS Playback

Google is working on bringing native HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) playback support to Chrome on desktop platforms, including Windows, macOS, Linux, and ChromeOS. Until now, the absence of HLS support forced users to rely on external players or browser extensions.

According to Wikipedia, “HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) is an HTTP-based adaptive bitrate streaming protocol developed by Apple Inc. and released in 2009. The protocol enjoys widespread support across media players, web browsers, mobile devices, and streaming servers.”

Until now, Chrome for iOS and Android supported HLS, but the desktop version did not.

Built-in HLS Player in Chrome on desktop

Today, we spotted a Chromium Gerrit entry indicating that Google is testing HLS playback support in Chrome for desktop.

“Add flags & experiment support for HLS desktop launch,” the Chromium commit message reads.

The commit references a flag (ENABLE_HLS_DEMUXER), which confirms the flag name: ‘Enables direct playback of HLS manifests, and describes it as below:

“Enables built-in HLS player for adaptive playback and live streams.”

We were able to manually enable the built-in HLS player in Chrome Canary and successfully play .m3u8 streaming links. Typically, when you open an .m3u8 URL in Chrome, it prompts you to download the file. Now, the stream plays directly in the browser without any issues.

HLS Extensions

There have been many requests from both developers and users for Google to implement native HLS playback support in desktop Chrome. Until now, many have had to rely on extensions like “Native HLS Playback”, “Inline HLS Player”, and “HLS Player – m3u8 Streaming Player”, which each have significant user bases, with some reaching over 100,000 or even 200,000 installs

In case you didn’t know, there are clear advantages to using HLS over MP4. HLS uses less bandwidth because it loads one small video chunk at a time. In contrast, MP4 downloads the entire file at once, even if you’re skipping to a point in the middle,which can consume more bandwidth.

HLS is widely used by streaming services like YouTube and Netflix. It’s safe and compatible with nearly every device. It uses .m3u8 files to organize and play small video segments, which helps videos load better in modern browsers and apps. Since each segment is delivered securely over HTTPS, HLS is both reliable and secure for streaming content online.

Google is still testing the desktop HLS support, so the built-in player may take some time to appear in stable release. We’ll keep you updated when the feature becomes available for wider testing, and once it lands in the stable version of Chrome.

Alongside adding HLS support to Chrome on desktop, Google is also introducing an AI Mode shortcut in the Chrome address bar and New Tab Page search box. Additionally, Google Drive support is being integrated into the Chrome PDF Viewer for easier access to PDF documents.