Early Nightly’s Firefox for ARM version Windows 10 are online

The first Firefox Nightly for the ARM version of Windows 10 is available. According to Mozilla, this Nightly is a bit more unpredictable than a Nightly normally is, but normal browsing should nevertheless be possible, as user tests also show.

The Nightly was released on December 20, but has gone largely unnoticed until now. In the mailing, Mozilla developer Nathan Froyd explains that this version has not passed Mozilla’s automated tests and therefore may have some more issues. What exactly that process entails and why this version did not go through it is not clear. Those interested can find the Nightly in the Mozilla archive, the version in question is labeled aarch64.

Froyd clearly wants to keep expectations in check: “The Gecko profiler isn’t working, neither is the crash reporter, neither is the JS JIT IonMonkey, WebRTC is off, EME isn’t working yet, so on. Did I mention this is a nightly?” The good news is that this Nightly just has an updater and that an update was released last Saturday.

This variant of the browser uses ARM’s 64bit architecture and will use a separate processor core per tab to optimize performance. Also from the Chromium project, known from Google Chrome, there is apparently an ARM variant.