Firefox for Windows 10 ARM is Ready for Testing
Make no mistake, the days of everyone using an ARM-powered laptop or desktop is still several years, or longer, away. But it’s not hard to see how one day, the idea of using a SnapDragon chip instead of something from Intel or AMD for your laptop will become a wide-spread reality.
The latest chips from Qualcomm, the 8cx, haven’t caught on in a big way but as both Microsoft and Qualcomm continue to push forward, there is no doubt that they are making serious progress in terms of performance at the chip and OS level.
So much so that Microsoft has prototype Surface Pro devices floating around that use Qualcomm chips instead of Intel’s hardware. The company has considered replacing the low-end Pro devices with Snapdragon chips but so far, has yet to ship any products that do so for various reasons.
When it comes to supporting Windows 10 on ARM, developing applications is easier today than it was back in the Surface RT era and if you want a different browser than Edge, you can now download FireFox. Firefox and Qualcomm showed this browser off back in December but now it’s ready for testing.
If you have a Windows 10 device powered by an ARM chip, you can grab the browser from here.
While this may not be an Earth-shattering announcement, the more companies who start natively supporting Windows devices running on ARM hardware, the easier the transition will be from classic setups that use x86, to an ARM-based future.
Couple this news with Windows Lite and a laptop running an 8cx becomes a lot more lucrative of a proposition. Only time will tell if ARM and Windows have a long-tailed future but with each new application, chip, and OS update, the possibility becomes a little bit more appealing.