Mozilla Finally Begins Offering Firefox ARM64 Linux Binaries

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mozilla Finally Begins Offering Firefox ARM64 Linux Binaries

While the Firefox web browser has long worked on AArch64 Linux and Mozilla even offers Windows ARM64/AArch64 binaries, to date Mozilla hasn't released official ARM64/AArch64 binaries for Linux. That is finally beginning to change...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mozilla-Firefox-ARM64-Nightly

[schmidtbag]

Makes me wonder if this now means we'll see better DRM support.

[Beryesa]

Since the flatpak is official and also comes directly from their pipeline (no flathub build), it would be nice if they update that as well!

[nanonyme]

Since the flatpak is official and also comes directly from their pipeline (no flathub build), it would be nice if they update that as well!

To be fair, if it came from Flathub, there would have been ARM64 builds years ago. I was anyway thinking of this same thing but it seems ultimately premature since the post is talking of nightlies. Those aren't available through Flathub.

[andyprough]

Great albeit arguably long overdue

What is so great about it and what is so long overdue about it Michael?

While I like using the binaries myself, the best way to use Firefox has always been from the version built by the particular distro. I don't see any great value in this - it's not like Windows where you have to go to a thousand random websites to download what you hope are legitimate .exe packages to install your programs. Firefox is almost universally installed by default by distro makers.

[smitty3268]

What is so great about it and what is so long overdue about it Michael?

It's good because of the CI and that upstream will hopefully find and fix any ARM-Linux bugs much faster, instead of making it the distros problem to fix any bugs that come up.

For the end user, I agree it doesn't really matter much.

[andyprough]

upstream will hopefully find and fix any ARM-Linux bugs much faster, instead of making it the distros problem to fix any bugs that come up

Maybe. But distros should also be heavily involved in building important packages and submitting bug reports and recommending fixes. Mozilla is not going to be the experts on every software configuration for every architecture.

[ezst036]

I hope this leads to Firefox being updated more often for UBports.

[phoronix38]

Makes me wonder if this now means we'll see better DRM support.

That was my first thought and hope also.

[treba]

What is so great about it and what is so long overdue about it Michael?

Being able to use nightly/beta and mozregression on ARM is a big deal. So far it's been a pain to ask users if certain bugs have already been fixed / if some fix works for them as distros usually only ship the stable release.

So this should improve quality for all ARM users.