Firefox Updated With Native Support for M1 Macs, Mozilla Touts 'Dramatic Performance Improvements'

Tuesday December 15, 2020 8:31 am PST by Joe Rossignol

Mozilla today released Firefox version 84 with native support for Apple Silicon Macs with the M1 chip, touting "dramatic performance improvements" over the previous, unoptimized version of the web browser.

Specifically, Firefox now launches over 2.5 times faster and web apps are now twice as responsive, according to Mozilla.

If you are using a Mac with the M1 chip, Mozilla says you will need to fully exit and restart Firefox after upgrading to version 84 in order for the browser to run natively on Apple Silicon. Mozilla promises not only faster performance, but also better battery life.

Firefox 84 is also the final version to support Adobe Flash.

Apple recently shared a list of popular apps optimized for M1 Macs that are available in the Mac App Store, such as Pixelmator Pro, Adobe Lightroom, Affinity Designer, Darkroom, Fantastical, OmniFocus, BBEdit, Instapaper, and Twitter. Apple boasted that apps optimized for the M1 chip deliver "game-changing speed and capabilities."

Last month, Apple released its first Macs with the M1 chip, including a new 13-inch MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac mini.

Tags: Firefox, M1 Guide, Mozilla

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Top Rated Comments

parth

77 months ago

uninstalling google chrome, installing Firefox. :)

Score: 30 Votes (Like | Disagree)

macsplusmacs

77 months ago

Quite the jump.

Congrats team firefox.

Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)

ikir

77 months ago

My main browser is Safari but I’m also using Firefox for few problematic website. I trust Mozilla, instead Google is evil we know: https://chromeisbad.com/

Thanks for M1 build!!

Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)

Konigi

77 months ago

We haven't discussed the most important thing yet: Firefox still hasn't updated its icon for Big Sur. Very disappointing.
(Apart from that it's extremely fast, reliable, doesn't use a lot of memory, but that's all second to the icon.)

Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)

MRrainer

77 months ago

I really wonder what kind of rabbits Intel will be able to pull out of their fab-hats.
If in two years Apple has a system to replace the MacPro, that would mean there are server-class chips in the horizon.
If Microsoft ported over stuff like SQL Server to that, it could mean tremendous cost savings for power and cooling.

That in turn could be the end of Intel as we know it.

But even the hardware available now is just too good for devs to ignore, so I expect full support from most Open Source software within a year.
And I expect most Microsoft employees regardless of which division they work for have now taken a look at it and asked themselves, once again, „Why can’t we do this?“.

This might be a „MacOS X Tiger“ moment again, where Apple has delivered on all the promises that Microsoft made.

Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)