Firefox beta supports Apple silicon natively

#1

Post by Austin_Conlon » Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 11:43 PM UTC

Firefox beta supports Apple silicon natively
bugzilla.mozilla.org

Re: Firefox beta supports Apple silicon natively

#2

Post by amanzi » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 12:30 AM UTC

This is great news. Based on the early reviews coming in, native Apple apps perform amazingly well on the M1 chips. So it's going to be really important for third-party apps to support M1 natively to remain competitive.

Re: Firefox beta supports Apple silicon natively

#3

Post by kentiko » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 12:35 AM UTC

You can download it here :

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/#product-desktop-r...

Re: Firefox beta supports Apple silicon natively

#4

Post by brundolf » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 12:44 AM UTC

amanzi wrote: post #2

This is great news. Based on the early reviews coming in, native Apple apps perform amazingly well on the M1 chips. So it's going to be really important for third-party apps to support M1 natively to remain competitive.

From what I've read the performance is very competitive even for Rosetta apps. Native support will just make things even more astounding.

Re: Firefox beta supports Apple silicon natively

#5

Post by CamJN » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 12:45 AM UTC

amanzi wrote: post #2

This is great news. Based on the early reviews coming in, native Apple apps perform amazingly well on the M1 chips. So it's going to be really important for third-party apps to support M1 natively to remain competitive.

As a diehard Firefox user, it has never been competitive with safari when it comes to performance. JavaScriptCore and WebKit are kind of ridiculously fast. If only they were put in a browser that was at all usable.

Re: Firefox beta supports Apple silicon natively

#6

Post by bikeshaving » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 12:51 AM UTC

CamJN wrote: post #5

amanzi wrote: post #2

This is great news. Based on the early reviews coming in, native Apple apps perform amazingly well on the M1 chips. So it's going to be really important for third-party apps to support M1 natively to remain competitive.

As a diehard Firefox user, it has never been competitive with safari when it comes to performance. JavaScriptCore and WebKit are kind of ridiculously fast. If only they were put in a browser that was at all usable.

Have you tried Safari 14? I recently upgraded and they’ve finally fixed the address bar race conditions and swipe back/forward lag which drove me away in previous versions.

Re: Firefox beta supports Apple silicon natively

#7

Post by helloycombinat » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 12:51 AM UTC

What does this mean? M1 isn't an ARM64? Is it saying there's extra opcodes and this takes advantage of them?

Re: Firefox beta supports Apple silicon natively

#8

Post by wmf » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 12:54 AM UTC

helloycombinat wrote: post #7

What does this mean? M1 isn't an ARM64? Is it saying there's extra opcodes and this takes advantage of them?

It means they recompiled Firefox for macOS/ARM64.

Re: Firefox beta supports Apple silicon natively

#9

Post by flatiron » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 12:54 AM UTC

helloycombinat wrote: post #7

What does this mean? M1 isn't an ARM64? Is it saying there's extra opcodes and this takes advantage of them?

I assume this means it’s compiling with Xcode targeting the M1. Firefox has never had to target aarch64 on macOS before.

Re: Firefox beta supports Apple silicon natively

#10

Post by KMnO4 » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 12:55 AM UTC

helloycombinat wrote: post #7

What does this mean? M1 isn't an ARM64? Is it saying there's extra opcodes and this takes advantage of them?

It means that M1 Mac's will not be translating x86 opcodes. Apple has done a very good job of making the transition (relatively) painless, but it's still not entirely trivial for many large projects, so seeing this many native binaries is quite nice.