Mozilla has released an ARM version of its Firefox browser yesterday for Windows 10. While Microsoft and Google have been working together on Chromium browsers for Windows on ARM, Mozilla has been developing its own ARM64-native build of Firefox for Snapdragon-powered Windows laptops.
We got an early look at this version of Firefox late last year, and it seemed to fare well on an ARM laptop with a dozen tabs open.
This new build of Firefox is available today as part of Mozilla’s beta channel for the browser for anyone with an ARM-powered Windows 10 laptop to test. That might not be a lot of people right now, but Mozilla has been working on its Firefox Quantum technology to optimize Firefox for the octa-core CPUs available from Qualcomm.
This should mean the performance is relatively solid, while maintaining all of the regular web compatibility you’d expect from Firefox.
Chromium ARM64 builds seem relatively close, too. A developer successfully built and ran a version of Chromium on an ARM-powered laptop recently, demonstrating that it should also perform well on these devices. It’s not clear when Google or Microsoft will release ARM versions of their Chromium browsers, though.
Microsoft is currently testing its new Chromium-powered Edge browser with developers, ahead of a release across Windows, Mac, and ARM-powered versions of Windows 10.
If you’re interested in testing out the new Firefox on an ARM Windows laptop, you can download it from Mozilla’s beta site.
