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.

Apple Silicon Approaching

Speculation that Apple would switch its Mac lineup to use ARM CPUs had been ongoing in the industry for several years. As early as 2013, Apple had referred to the custom ARM chips they were putting in the iPhone as “desktop-class” designs.

While the claim initially met some scepticism, near the end of 2018 computer hardware magazine AnandTech published the results of running the industry-standard SPEC benchmark on the iPhone XS, showing that even workloads that reflect real-world desktop use cases reached desktop chip performance, and were doing so at significantly better power efficiency. This provided us with some warning that Apple might be ready to start the transition to the ARM architecture in the near future.

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