Mozilla announced that the latest Firefox beta is now available for Windows 10 devices that are powered by Qualcomm’s 64-bit Snapdragon Arm processors. Mozilla has been working with Qualcomm on this Firefox port since December of last year.
Back in December, Qualcomm took the stage at its Snapdragon Technology Summit to announce that both Chromium and Firefox are coming to Windows on ARM as native apps. While Chromium builds still aren’t ready to this day, native ARM64 builds of Firefox showed up in the nightly channel less than a month later.
Continuing its mission to bring the Firefox browser to seemingly every computing platform on the planet, Mozilla today released the app in beta form for Windows 10 Always Connected PCs.
Mozilla announced in December 2018 that it was collaborating with Qualcomm to optimize Firefox for the Snapdragon compute platform and planned to release a native ARM64 version of Firefox.
This particular version of Firefox is ARM64-native and developed in partnership with Qualcomm, which debuted a dedicated Always Connected PC chipset — Snapdragon 8cx — late last year. It’s based upon the multiple process-optimized Firefox Quantm, supporting eight-core CPUs, and promises to “intelligently divide browsing tasks across those cores” using Rust.
Firefox now joins Microsoft’s Edge browser as offering native support for WoS systems, leaving only Chrome left, which is likely to happen as Edge shifts to a Chromium code base in due course, with Chromium-based Edge already supporting native ARM64 WoS at some level. Firefox has been a popular browser for over a decade, due to its continued claims of speed, plug-in support, and the fact that it’s not Google. The build for WoS announced today builds on performance work with Firefox Quantum, which aims to use multi-threaded compute resources more efficiently than before, which should be a positive for the Snapdragon chips that have an eight-core configuration. This is implemented through the programming language Rust, taking advantage of its concurrency support.