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.
Firefox Quantum on Windows 10 Arm-Powered Devices
“Project Quantum” was Mozilla’s effort to overhaul and rejuvenate its browser with high-performance and memory-safe components written in the Rust programming language. The overhaul is now paying off in more ways than one, as the Rust programming language has allowed Firefox to become much more optimized for multi-core systems.
This is good news for Firefox, perhaps to the detriment of competitors, because computing systems are now starting to have a high number of cores, including on mobile devices. Smartphones with eight CPU cores are basically available at almost every price range today, while on the desktop AMD has made the case that mainstream systems should come with at least six or eight CPU cores, instead of only two or four.
Windows 10 on Snapdragon
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor is the main Arm-based platform to support the full version of Windows 10, unlike previous “Windows RT” devices that only supported Universal Windows Platform applications. Qualcomm has been working with Microsoft for the past few years so that Windows 10 can run with high performance and high efficiency on 64-bit Arm chips.
Now, Qualcomm has also started to work with developers of popular applications, such as Mozilla, to port their apps to the 64-bit Arm architecture on Windows 10. Firefox already supports Arm-based Android devices, as well as iOS devices and Amazon’s Fire TV.
Mozilla encourages those that want to try the latest Firefox beta on their own Snapdragon Windows 10 devices to report bugs and crashes so that the organization can improve the application for everyone more quickly.
