Mozilla and Qualcomm have announced a partnership that would see both companies bring a version of Firefox that works on Qualcomm's forthcoming ARM-based PCs running on the just-announced Snapdragon 8cx chip.
This new 64-bit iteration of the browser will be optimized to run on the aforementioned platform for better and more efficient performance. Very few details are available at the moment, but it appears Firefox is making each browser tab run on individual cores in the CPU. Fair enough — Qualcomm's new chip will have plenty of cores to spare.
"Mozilla is excited to be collaborating with Qualcomm and optimizing Firefox for the Snapdragon compute platform with a native ARM64 version of Firefox that takes full advantage of the capabilities of the Snapdragon compute platform and gives users the most performant out of the box experience possible," says Mozilla in a blog post.
The Thing About ARM
Many developers often have to perform different maneuvers to make their app run properly on ARM-based machines. Microsoft, for instance, uses a number of emulation techniques, which work quite well but come with a toll on power and performance, as TechCrunch notes. Native applications don't need any kind of emulation, of course, so in effect, they run faster and more smoothly.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that web browsers are one of the most used software on any machine, so them running without a snag is highly crucial. As such, major browser vendors make all sorts of attempts to offer the best support for the platform, and that's exactly what Mozilla and Qualcomm hope to achieve with a version of Firefox native to Windows 10 on ARM.
Mozilla is mum about the release date of the browser in question, however, so make sure to check back with Tech Times as we gather more information about this story.
Qualcomm 8cx Platform
This isn't the only bombshell news from Qualcomm. As mentioned above, Qualcomm has also officially unveiled its latest 8cx platform for PCs, signaling the company's ongoing efforts to attempt a slow but sure capture of the PC market. Such a proposition would be ambitious, if not downright outrageous years ago. But things are different now. People are using their smartphones more, and demand for high-powered PCs for crowds who don't need all the bells and whistles are shrinking, it seems.
Qualcomm coming out with a low-powered but still relatively capable platform for mid-tier machines is a smart move at this point in time. Plus, competition is always good, especially since consumers reap all the rewards.
