news coverage and some surprises
The release of Apple Silicon-based Macs at the end of last year
generated a flurry of news coverage and some surprises at the
machine’s performance. This post details some background information
on the experience of porting Firefox to run natively on these CPUs.
We’ll start with some background on the Mac transition and give an
overview of Firefox internals that needed to know about the new
architecture, before moving on to the concept of Universal Binaries.
We’ll then explain how DRM/EME works on the new platform, talk about
our experience with macOS Big Sur, and discuss various updater
problems we had to deal with. We’ll conclude with the release and an
overview of various other improvements that are in the pipeline.