Mozilla has delivered what it promised back in December last year. The company has finally revealed a new version Firefox called Firefox Nightly which is made for ARM PCs. You can download the first build of the native ARM64 build of the browser from here.
As you might have read in one of our previous articles where we wrote about how Qualcomm and Mozilla are working closely with each other on this, each tab on Firefox will use individual CPU cores and the browser will be built for ARM64 to offer great performance with multi-threaded support.
Firefox writes:
I’m excited to announce that we have bona fide arm64 windows nightlies available for download!
https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-central/
featuring full updater and installer support; see the firefox-66.0a1.en-US.win64-aarch64* files in that directory. Thanks to Tom Prince for the updater work and Rob Strong and Matt Howell for the installer work.
Please note that these builds are even nightlier than our normal nightlies on other platforms: they have *not* gone through our usual automated testing process, bugs are almost certain to crop up, etc. etc. That being said, I have been using builds off automation (manually updating them) for several weeks now and have had a pleasant experience.
There are still a few areas that we know need work: the Gecko profiler is not functional, but should be by the end of the week. The crashreporter does not work. Our top-tier JS JIT (IonMonkey) is not turned on. WebRTC is not turned on. EME (Netflix, etc.) does not work yet. And so forth…Did I mention that these are nightlies?
If you use these builds and you find issues, please file bugs blocking:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=arm64-windows-bugs
so we can start to triage and prioritize what needs to be fixed.
Happy dogfooding!
One important point to note here is that this never replaces you primary browser yet. Much like any other project at its initial stage, the first build of Firefox Nightly too never guarantees you the same quality of performance which you get on Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome.
