
Firefox Beta for Windows 10 on Qualcomm Snapdragon Now Available - sohkamyung
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/04/11/firefox-beta-for-windows-10-on-qualcomm-snapdragon-always-connected-pcs-now-available/
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AaronFriel
In one of the recent threads about Microsoft switching their Edge browser to
be based on Chromium, I thought I read that one of the arguments against
Firefox was the lack of ARM support.

I will continue to hold that the Edge team/leadership at MSFT made a wrong
choice betting on a web monoculture here, and I hope Firefox remains popular
as an alternative.

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mintplant
Firefox has had ARM support for a long time. Heck, there's even MIPS support
in the tree, though I don't know whether anyone's exercised that code
recently.

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xeeeeeeeeeeenu
It didn't have ARM64 JIT support until very recently.

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mintplant
I wrote patches to the existing ARM64 code generator three years ago...

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bhauer
I want a phone-sized Windows 10 ARM device that runs desktop-class software
such as this version of Firefox when docked (and adapts to mobile capabilities
when undocked, as a responsive web-app does). Although not Windows, Purism
seems the most promising runner in anything like this race today, and I'm
hoping more contestants enter the race.

In any event, thank you Mozilla for supporting this platform. I hope Microsoft
puts some more serious weight behind it.

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ocdtrekkie
This is also in the news this morning: They've got rudimentary radio support
working on the Lumia 950 running Windows 10 on ARM.
[https://mspoweruser.com/breakthrough-for-windows-10-for-
arm-...](https://mspoweruser.com/breakthrough-for-windows-10-for-arm-on-the-
lumia-950/)

Unfortunately, Microsoft will not likely reenter this arena or support phones
with Windows in any official capacity, the current direction from Satya
appears to be to retreat from every competitive market and cede all standards
to El Goog. Microsoft promotes Android, is building a browser based on
Chromium, and is abandoning Cortana. Best hope for this would be a third party
building an ultraportable themselves and writing their own phone support.

~~~
e1ven
It makes some short-term sense.

It seems like they're focusing on the enterprise element of their business,
which is what's making more money, has fewer players to work with, etc.

I'd imagine they see their future closer to HP than Apple.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Oh, sure, Satya's strategy has done wonders for Microsoft's stock value, but
Microsoft's constant retreats from various parts of their ecosystem
sequentially harms the remaining parts of their ecosystem. The further they
retreat, the less people have a reason to build on Microsoft's platforms.

And bear in mind, HP is a hardware company, they aren't worried about what
platform is running on their hardware. Microsoft is a software company, which
is a very different ball game.

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mey
They are working very hard to be a SaaS and cloud infra company. It's why they
are promoting iOS and Android with Office 365.

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ocdtrekkie
The problem is they're playing in someone else's sandbox that way. Google is a
competitor on SaaS and cloud infrastructure, and have the ability to directly
integrate their services with Chrome and Android, whereas Microsoft does not.

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pjmlp
Google is playing 3rd place on SaaS and clound infrastructure.

It is all about AWS or Azure.

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detaro
In the segment of Office 365 etc?

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swiley
Everyone seems to be tripping over themselves in excitement about these
qualcomm SOCs. Qualcomm has a history of being pretty hostile toward everyone,
because of that these have a pretty low chance of being used in any kind of
device that will be able to run current software for more than a few years.

Meanwhile we have devices based on freescale IMX chips that run GNU/Linux with
X11 and whatever else you want (including firefox/iceweasel) right now, they
probably just don't have the on board peripherals and connectivity you want.

~~~
floatboth
Well… it's a complex situation, they officially contribute to Freedreno IIRC,
but the firmware is still terrible. For some reason you're always booted under
a hypervisor, even. There was kind of a hope that Windows requiring ACPI would
improve the situation, but they seem to still use a lot of custom crap.

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DiabloD3
You know what would be neat? A Snapdragon mini-box that has an m2 slot, and
actual full sized DDR3 DIMM slots (so I can reuse sticks I already own).

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metildaa
Most Qualcomm chips expect DDR3L/DDR4L, so desktop and most 2+ year old laptop
ram won't work.

Additionally, the drivers for Snapdragon SOCs are a mess, and they haven't
made an effort to get all their changes in the mainline kernel. For such a
large company, Qualcomm has some pretty wretched development and business
practices.

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mehrdadn
Anybody know what happened to the x86 on ARM thing Microsoft had a while back?

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wyday
It exists. Pick up a device that support ARM64 Windows 10 and it has
compatibility with x86 programs (via an emulation layer like WoW64).

This announcement is for Firefox for ARM64 Windows 10 (without using the
emulation layer). So, faster, uses less battery, etc.

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WorldMaker
Plus it will be great to have an ARM64 alternative to Chromium given the
disbanding of the EdgeHTML renderer.

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nogridbag
I'm looking forward to trying this out. I have a first get Windows on ARM
device and the standby battery life is amazing. If the browsing was a bit more
performant it would be a much better device. Youtube is quite sluggish with
Edge and YouTube TV doesn't even support Edge (at the moment) so I've been
using an x86 build of Firefox.

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acd
Could you run Windows 10 on an Arm phone?

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xeeeeeeeeeeenu
There's an unofficial port for Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL:
[https://github.com/WOA-Project/WOA-Deployer-Lumia](https://github.com/WOA-
Project/WOA-Deployer-Lumia)

Raspberry Pi is probably most accessible device for running Windows 10 on ARM:
[https://github.com/WOA-Project/WOA-Deployer-Rpi](https://github.com/WOA-
Project/WOA-Deployer-Rpi)

