First native ARM64 Firefox Nightly Build now available

We reported in December that Qualcomm was working with Mozilla to bring optimized-version of Firefox web browser for Snapdragon Windows PCs which would offer greater performance with multi-threaded support. Firefox said it would make each browser tab run on individual CPU cores as the newly announced Snapdragon 8cx is a Octo-core processor.

Now the first native ARM64 Build of Firefox is available to test, though given how early it is this is certainly at your own risk.

Mozilla 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!

The browser can now be downloadedat Mozilla here.

via The WC