Mozilla releases beta of Firefox for ARM-based Windows 10 laptops
Windows 10
There aren't yet many Qualcomm-based Windows 10 laptops out in the wild. But Microsoft, Google and Mozilla are all looking for ways to bring their browsers to these kinds of devices. First out of the gate is Mozilla.
On April 11, Mozilla is slated to deliver a beta build of Firefox for ARM-based laptops, as noted by CNET. The browser will be optimized to help reduce power consumption for ARM-based PCs that are aiming to provide long battery life. The new beta will be available for download from Mozilla's site.
Mozilla announced in December 2018 that it was collaborating with Qualcomm to optimize Firefox for the Snapdragon compute platform and planned to release a native ARM64 version of Firefox.
Meanwhile, Microsoft -- which just this week released its first public Canary and Developer test builds of Chromium-based Edge -- is continuing to work on the Chromium ARM64 platform in conjunction with Google.
From a Microsoft blog post earlier this week:
"We've been collaborating with Google engineers to enable Chromium to run natively on Windows on ARM devices starting with Chromium 73. With these contributions, Chromium-based browsers will soon be able to ship native implementations for ARM-based Windows 10 PCs, significantly improving their performance and battery life."