Developers are responding to Apple’s call, and Microsoft and Mozilla have just released new versions of Office and Firefox with native Apple M1 support.
Until now, users of new Mac systems with Apple M1 SoCs have had to use the Rosetta 2 layer to translate the Office code and make it executable also through the ARM architecture of the integrated processor. However, Microsoft has announced an update that brings native support for the new chip with Apple custom microarchitecture to almost the entire Office suite.
So far there are only Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Onenote for Apple Silicon — Microsoft Teams has not yet been published. Microsoft is working on it according to its own information, but it is not yet known when the platform, which combines chat, meetings, notes, and attachments, will run natively on M1.
The new Office apps also got a new look, which was adapted to the user interface of the new macOS Big Sur operating system.
Along with Microsoft, Mozilla has also released its native Firefox version 84.0 for Apple M1 systems. In addition, Firefox now also supports the 2D WebRender based on Rust under macOS.
Mozilla defines this release as the bearer of a “huge performance boost” compared to the previous non-optimized version. Launch times improve 2.5x, and web apps are at least twice as responsive, according to proclamations from the development team.
Mozilla promises not only vastly improved performance but also and above all, greater energy efficiency, which should produce a longer battery life. Note that Firefox 84 is also the latest version with Adobe Flash support.
Office and Firefox are just some of the apps already optimized to work natively on Apple Silicon. Among the many — Pixelmator Pro, Adobe Lightroom, Affinity Designer, Darkroom, Fantastical, OmniFocus, BBEdit, Instapaper, and Twitter. The native support for Apple Silicon, according to Apple, opens the way for “speed and revolutionary capabilities” than before with Intel CPU.
