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Firefox 8 for Windows x64: Has 64-bit browsing finally come of age?
- kenjackson 15y agoI'd love to hear from Mozilla how they got the 64bit version to be faster than the 32bit version. The 64bit versions of apps tend to have to move more data, due to the increased address size. The big advantage the 64bit versions tend to have is more registers for apps, but for most real apps the increased memory pressure is a bigger deal. Looking forward to Mozilla's blog on writing high performance 64bit apps. :-)
- mrsebastian 15y agoYeah, I think that's why its array manipulation performance was slower in the 64-bit version -- but I was very surprised to see that almost everything else was faster. 64-bit web apps... whatever next!
- vasi 15y agox86-64 has many more registers than x86, which can minimize pushing values on the stack, and therefore boosts speed. On 64-bit you can also assume that at least SSE2 is available, which can help optimizations in some cases.
- archangel_one 15y agoI vaguely recall seeing a Mozilla presentation while back saying that they had gone to using 64 bits to store JS variables even on 32-bit machines - this was faster since doubles then fit directly, but presumably on a 64-bit machine it would get faster again. Edit: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/03/firefox4-performance/ http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/03/firefox4-performance/ refers to 64-bit NaN boxing and links to the article I was thinking of, but unfortunately that seems to be broken.
- danwolff 15y ago"NaN-tagging: 64 bit tagged values are used for stack slots and table slots. Unboxed floating-point numbers (doubles) are overlayed with tagged object references. The latter can be distinguished from numbers via the use of special NaNs as tags. It's a remote descendant of pointer-tagging. [The idea dates back to 2006, but I haven't disclosed it before 2008. Special NaNs have been used to overlay pointers before. Others have used it for tagging later on. The specific layout is of my own devising.]" [1] [1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lua.general/58908 http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lua.general/58908
- kenjackson 15y agoInteresting, but I don't think I fully understand when you'd use it. Why would you need to couple object references with floating-point values?
- danwolff 15y agoUneducated conjecture: They're not just any floating points, they are doubles. You need twice the capacity of one (32-bit double) in order to fake 64 bits. I assume that this helps meet the requirements of other pieces being hacked together.
- NanoWar 15y agoHow come I use Firefox 3.6 and there is already a version 8? Man, things go fast...
- trafficlight 15y agoWhere have you been? The Firefox version scheme changes have been talked about almost every day here for the last few months.
- mixmastamyk 15y agoDoesn't seem to feel right. They could have gone with 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, etc, and expectations would be better managed.
- wmf 15y agoUntil they got to 4.39 and people would have the opposite complaint.
- rbanffy 15y agoDo you know which version is the current one for Google Chrome? Me neither. That's the point - it works and I don't really care which version number I am running as long as it works.
- mixmastamyk 15y agoI don't use chrome much, but have a decade or two of experience with point releases delivering significant features. Hence the dissonance.
- kijinbear 15y agoJust wait until people start talking about IE 26, Firefox 34, Chrome 42, etc. Now that even the Linux kernel is jumping onto the inflated-version-numbers bandwagon, it won't be long.
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- hristov 15y agoLinux users have been using 64 bit Firefox for years now.
- beej71 15y ago64-bit Chrome, as well, for that matter.
- ben_straub 15y agoThe largest benefit you can expect to get from compiling 64-bit is the ability to address more memory. Performance is a bad reason, unless you need extra floating-point precision or your problem is highly vectorized, and you just doubled the size of all your pointers, so you'll be getting more cache misses. I'm really interested in how they managed these downsides.
- azakai 15y agoDon't forget that 64-bit has more registers. That can be significant for performance.
- mixmastamyk 15y agoYes on x86, it is not generally the case.
- jbk 15y agoThe story is about Firefox on Windows...
- mixmastamyk 15y agoHe wrote it as if it were a universal truth. (And the downvoter can shove it.)
- antimora 15y agogreat, now all my 8GB of ram will be eaten up.
- bonch 15y agoSafari and Internet Explorer have been 64-bit for quite some time. Why does 64-bit browsing come of age because of Firefox on Windows?
- 01Michael10 15y agoI keep reading about Firefox 7/8 and their improved memory footprints, speed, and now a 64-bit version. Firefox 6 hasn't even been released yet and it's all ready a let down.
- SeoxyS 15y ago1) Wait, they're up to Firefox 8 now? I thought I heard something about Firefox 5 coming out a couple weeks ago. 2) Wait, they're still mainly 32-bit? People still use 32-bit computers? Maybe that's my being a Mac user, but I don't think I have very many 32-bit apps left.
- eric-hu 15y agoFirefox 5 is already out. Mozilla's aiming for shorter development cycles on each major version release to compete better with Chrome. As a Windows/Ubuntu user, I'm under the impression that most apps I use are still 32 bit unless stated otherwise
- dfc 15y agoAs long as you don't run debian/amd64 and consider a decent flash binary from adobe a requirement.