Mozilla releases Firefox 84, adds native support for M1-based Macs, other changes

If you just bought an Apple Silicon M1-based Mac, this is going to come in handy.

Mozilla on Tuesday released version 84 of its Firefox web browser, which adds native support for M1 Macs alongside the following new features:

The Network panel is now able to handle unexpected crashes and render useful debugging details such as a related stack-trace.
WebRender rolls out to MacOS Big Sur, Windows devices with Intel Gen 6 GPUs, and Intel laptops running Windows 7 and 8.
Firefox now uses more modern techniques for allocating shared memory on Linux, improving performance and increasing compatibility with Docker.
The Accessibility Panel now includes an option for displaying elements in their tabbing order in order to help developers see what elements are focusable when tabbing and in what sequence.

Mozilla says that using the Speedometer 2.0 test, Firefox 84 launched over 2.5x faster and web apps are twice as responsive on Apple Silicon.

Finally, Firefox 84 is the last version to support Adobe Flash, which will be deprecated at the end of 2020.

If you’ve had a chance to try Firefox 84 on an M1-based Mac, please let us know about your experience in the comments.