5 ms·

There's definitely something wrong if it's so hard to go to 64-bit. This has been their problem for almost a decade.

• pcwalton 11y ago
  It's not hard to go to 64 bit. It's hard to go to 64 bit without any performance regressions. (This holds for most performance-critical, memory-access-bound software.)
  • cwzwarich 11y ago
    Hasn't it been 64-bit on OS X and Linux for a while? Presumedly those releases had acceptable performance, so what are the Windows-specific problems?
    • bzbarsky 11y ago
      A few relevant notes: 1) The OS X and Linux versions of Firefox have generally been slower than the Windows version all along, even before switching to 64-bit. Largely because gcc (and later clang/llvm on Mac) generated slower code at least for this particular codebase than MSVC did. This is also why the Windows release versions of Firefox are in fact compiled with MSVC, not gcc. 2) Most benchmarking done by the press is done on Windows, and most of the users are on Windows. Performance regressions on Windows do in fact matter more, both in terms of actual user experience and marketing/perception than performance regressions on other platforms. I wish that were not so, but it is.
      • zurn 11y ago
        Anyone have a link for a bugzilla tracking bug for win64/win32 performance parity? I lucked out with a web search. It would be interesting to see what kind of things are being done for this.
• detaro 11y ago
  not surprisingly, plugins seem to have been a big issue.