Mozilla has announced that it’s working with Qualcomm to bring a native version of its popular Firefox browser to Windows 10 on ARM. The announcement follows Microsoft’s confirmation that it’s working with Google on a native ARM64 version of Chrome for Windows 10 on ARM. It also follows Qualcomm’s announcement of its new 8cx platform for always-connected PCs. The native versions of these browsers for the platform will provide far better performance compared to emulated versions.
Microsoft relies on several emulation techniques to run Windows 10 apps on ARM-based computers. However, they don’t work as they should often, with noticeable gaps in both performance and efficiency.
Apps developed specifically for the platform don’t suffer from this drawback and will thus provide a much better experience to the users. Web browsers are undoubtedly the most used apps on any platform so it makes sense for both Google and Mozilla to prepare native ARM64 versions of their popular browsers.
No further details have been revealed by Mozilla at this point in time so it’s unclear when we might see the native version of Firefox for Windows 10 on ARM being released. Given that it has only just announced the start of the development work, it can reasonably be expected that the release won’t take place before 2019.