Mozilla and Qualcomm are bringing a native version of Firefox to Windows 10 on ARM

NelsonG · December 6, 2018

Microsoft is working with Google to bring a native ARM64 version of Chrome to Windows 10 on ARM and as Mozilla announced today, it, too, is working on bringing a native version of Firefox to Windows 10 on ARM. The organization is doing so in cooperation with Qualcomm.

Typically, to make any Windows 10 application run on ARM-based machines, Microsoft uses a number of emulation techniques. Those work quite well, but they do incur both power and performance cost. Native applications obviously don’t need emulation, so they run faster and more efficiently. Given that browsers are among the most-used applications, it’s no surprise that the major browser vendors are interested in offering the best support for the platform, even if we’re still talking about a very small niche for the time being.

We asked Mozilla for a release date for this Windows 10 on ARM version, but the organization has yet to provide us with this information. We’ll update this post once we learn more.

Qualcomm also today announced its new premium 8cx platform for PCs, which extends the company’s bet on the PC market. It’s probably no surprise that Mozilla chose today to make its announcement. In addition, though, Microsoft also today announced that it will move to the Chromium engine for its Edge browser. That leaves Firefox’s Gecko engine and WebKit, which Apple’s Safari uses, as the last two competitors with any major market share in the browser space.