Mozilla has released the latest version of its flagship Firefox web browser, which, among other things, adds support for M1-based Macs.

“Native support for macOS devices built with Apple Silicon CPUs brings dramatic performance improvements over the non-native build that was shipped in Firefox 83,” the Firefox 84 release notes explain. “Firefox launches over 2.5 times faster and web apps are now twice as responsive.”

If you’re already using Firefox 83 on an M1-based Mac, you will need to follow Mozilla’s instructions to upgrade to the new version. (Basically, you just need to make sure you quit Firefox 83 before installing.)

Firefox 84 also includes WebRender, Mozilla’s hardware-accelerated rendering engine, with compatibility on macOS Big Sur, Windows 10 PCs with Intel 6th-generation GPUs, and Intel laptops running Windows 7 and 8. It also uses more modern techniques for allocating shared memory on Linux, improving performance and increasing compatibility with Docker. And it’s the final Firefox release to support Adobe Flash.

You can download Firefox from the Mozilla website.

Tagged with Apple M1