8 ms·

64-bit Firefox discontinued on Windows

50 points by mappu 14y ago

mappu 14y ago
Following a curiously short discussion, and despite 50% of Nightly testers on windows using the 64-bit builds[1] and a Windows user demonstrating firefox using 10GB of memory[2] (above the address space limit of 32-bit), the 64-bit nightly builds of Firefox on Windows are to be discontinued. _______________________________ 1. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=814009 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=814009 2. http://archive.installgentoo.net/g/thread/29261499 http://archive.installgentoo.net/g/thread/29261499 3. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.apps.firefox/jpX_z5zieD4 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.apps.fir... - Full discussion thread
- RossDM 14y ago
  Heh, that comment thread pretty much sums it up. Shame to see this happen.
- benth 14y ago
  Misleading headline and obviously you know it.
- ajryan 14y ago
  Seems like it would be better to focus on the single problem of not crossing the 32-bit address boundary rather than the multitude of x64 problems.
  - shardling 14y ago
    That's not really possible -- you'll see that the folk crossing that boundary are keeping open several hundreds of tabs at a time. As memory usage is reduced, these folk will just open more tabs.
- DanBC 14y ago
  In case it's not obvious: [2] links to a chan style discussion board, with chan style culture. The first thing I read (because it's in big red letters) was "I WANT TO REMIND YOU THAT CP IS NOT TOLERATED AND MUST BE REPORTED".
  - mappu 14y ago
    Sorry, possibly could have made that more clear (it's also not affiliated with Gentoo). In defense of 4chan, the exact same rule applies to HN (the law applies to everyone), every large website has trouble with spam, and there's nothing offensive there outside of mild profanity and teenagerism. It's otherwise a perfectly ordinary technical discussion thread from a board that has a large number of firefox users and where Nightly is strongly encouraged amongst PC enthusiasts.
    - DanBC 14y ago
      Yes, I agree. I was perhaps a bit sniffy. Often great discussion can be found on those style boards.
shritesh 14y ago
I was really looking forward to the 64-bit version but it never looked as if Mozilla was ever serious about it.
- ajryan 14y ago
  What did you need that only x64 could provide?
  - barrkel 14y ago
    My desktop has 24GB of RAM, yet Firefox crashes on a regular basis when it bounces off its 2GB limit, usually when many image-heavy pages are opened, especially simultaneously from a folder of bookmarks. Seems like the single simplest thing to fix this is the option of using a 64-bit binary, given that it appears most of the work is already done. The alternative is to break up the browser into multiple processes, much like Chrome. That would however reduce the distinctiveness of Firefox and be one less reason to keep using it. Though the reliability effects of using multiple processes is probably better in the end. But sooner or later - sooner if various GL things ever get proper uptake - individual web pages are going to need more than 2GB to display and run. The bullet will need to be bitten, even in a multi-process model.
    - Dylan16807 14y ago
      2GB limit? Unless something went wrong on your system firefox should be marked as large address aware and get 4GB. I'm impressed that you've gotten a browser that big on normal pages. I've only gotten it on ridiculously huge test pages or from memory leaking over time.
      - gryph0n 14y ago
        I run into the 2G limit very frequently too. I usually shutdown my home & work systems only once a week. Firefox too runs continuously from the 1st day of the week. Over the duration of a week, as I open more webpages, the virtual memory consumption rises continuously till it hits the 2G limit and then the process kills itself. Usually during the last few hundred MB before the 2G limit, it becomes pretty unresponsive. I believe you're referring to the linker options for large memory awareness http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wz223b1z%28v=vs.80%29.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wz223b1z%28v=vs.80%2... I'd be glad if as a user (not developer) I can set that option somewhere. P.S., I am a developer, but over time, you learn that building unfamiliar codebases is not a trivial exercise. On Win32, I'm just happier downloading vendor provided binaries. On Linux, I can be both, happy and frustrated, building my own binaries with Gentoo.
JohnTHaller 14y ago
As mentioned in the bug and other locations, Firefox's x64 builds are pre-release nightlies only and not anywhere near ready for primetime. They still get a lot of bug reports that are x64 only and don't have resources dedicated to it because Firefox OS and Metro mode have higher priorities. For folks in the bug saying that this will make them somehow abandon Firefox, if 64-bit is really that important to them, they'll have to use Internet Explorer only and deal with many popular plugins not working (Adobe Reader, Quicktime, etc). Opera has an experimental Win64 build from February that is now out of date with known security issues. No further progress has been made or release schedule announced. Chrome, Chromium and Iron are 32-bit only and have no 64-bit builds, not even pre-alpha experimental ones. Apple has abandoned Safari for Windows entirely. So, as far as 64-bit browsers on Windows... you've got IE and that's it. UPDATE: As correctly pointed out below, there is a snapshot (alpha, incomplete, unstable) build of current Opera for Win x64. Apologies on the incomplete information in this post originally.
- barrkel 14y ago
  Plugins not working is a security / reliability bonus, from my perspective; every few months, I have to hunt them down and delete / disable them. At least it's easier to disable them in Firefox than in Chrome.
  - mh- 14y ago
    chrome://plugins
- Osiris 14y ago
  Your information about Opera is incorrect. The current release (12.11) has a x64 build (http://snapshot.opera.com/12.11-1661_windows.html http://snapshot.opera.com/12.11-1661_windows.html). Why the downvote? The link takes you to the download for the 64-bit Windows version that was just released
  - JohnTHaller 14y ago
    I stand corrected, I was basing it on the out of process plugins page that they used to keep updated: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/64-bit-opera-and-out-of-process-plug-ins/ http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/64-bit-opera-and-out-of-p... Opera does have a Snapshot Win x64 build available which they describe as "Cutting edge, alpha quality, incomplete, and often contain critical bugs". This does sound a lot like the now-discontinued Firefox Win x64 nightlies (aka nowhere near stable). (PS - You get an upvote from me. Not sure why someone downvoted you.)
csense 14y ago
This decision makes no sense. I figure that, sometime in the next 10 years, 32-bit OS'es will go the way of 16-bit OS'es. The time to iron out the bugs in the 64-bit version is now, while it's only used by diehard techies who understand the necessity of switching to 64-bit. If we wait until the unwashed masses are forced to switch by ever-advancing technology, they'll jump ship for browsers that have been preparing for years. Also, the fact that the link has exactly one post in between the proposal and the switch tells me that nobody noticed it, and more effort should have been made to get community review, buy-in, sign-offs. There should have been lots of commentary and input on such a fundamental feature as 64-bit support in such a high-profile open-source project.
- mappu 14y ago
  Agreed. To be fair, there was some small amount more commentary. See the other post for more links - the submission points simply to the announcement thread.
- kelnos 14y ago
  The real discussion is here (~40 messages): https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.apps.firefox/jpX_z5zieD4 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.apps.fir... The poster asked that people follow up in a different newsgroup.
- pyre 14y ago
  To be fair, as others have mentioned Chrome doesn't even have a pre-Alpha 64-bit version, and a number of plugins don't work with 64-bit browsers. Sometimes you have to pick your battles, it's not like Mozilla has infinite resources.
  - justinschuh 14y ago
    I'm one of the leads for the 64-bit Chrome on Windows work, and it is very much underway. I can't commit to a timeline, but we are attacking this pretty aggressively right now because it's a nice win on both the security and performance fronts. I'm a bit shocked to see Firefox moving in the opposite direction.
T-Winsnes 14y ago
There is always waterfox for 64bit http://www.waterfoxproject.org/ http://www.waterfoxproject.org/
- nextw33k 14y ago
  I used Waterfox for about 6months. It was perfect, until I found out that 32bit Firefox is faster in the benchmarks. 64bit applications are not always better. It actually can waste resources in some applications. My IM and Text editor are 32bit and there is no reason for them to be 64bit.
  - T-Winsnes 14y ago
    I agree, if you're not touching the memory limits of 32bit, there is no reason to do 64bit. Because 64bit applications have to pass 64bit addresses to read from memory it is slower than 32bit which only have to pass 32bits of data (simplified but true).
DanBC 14y ago
It seems that the only people who need 64 bit browsers are those who have very many tabs open. I don't understand that use case. I don't understand how someone can work with 500 tabs open. Why do you run a browser with very many tabs open? Or do you need 64 bit for some other reason? EDIT for the silent downvoters: I'm not criticising people who have very many tabs open. Nor am I saying that's the only reason to have 64 bit browser.
- iSnow 14y ago
  Some people (like me) have stopped using bookmarks and simply leave open interesting pages. I have ~20 browser windows open, each window is a virtual workplace. One is political news, one is tech news (featuring hacker news, the Register, slashdot, appleinsider...) one is Java SE API tabs, one is Clojure, one is imageboards. While 500 tabs is a bit much, I can easily get to 200 without getting lost. It is simply a way to organize my stuff. Had one window with several tabs open for Scala, then found that Scala is not for me. Closed that window and it is all gone. No need to fiddle with bookmarks. That said, the missing 64bit support will surely not make me leave Firefox. After all, it will surely come back over time.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    You might like a tree-tabs plugin of some sort. Makes the tab bar run vertically along one size and tabs open into a collapsible tree structure; I find it very nice for handling hundreds of tabs.
- justinschuh 14y ago
  On Chrome we don't need it for large numbers of tabs (because our multi-process architecture covers that). However, we're working on it because we've identified significant security benefits (e.g. much better ASLR) and improved performance in a number of scenarios (mostly due to the additional registers).
- jlgreco 14y ago
  If I have the ram.. why not use it? Putty and Outlook can sop up the remains, but the bulk of my memory is either going to be used for my browser.. or wasted. High numbers of tabs certainly isn't a usage pattern that is for everybody.. but clearly there are many of us who use it.
Derbasti 14y ago
Could someone enlighten me why 64 bit seems to be so hard to do on Windows as compared to other platforms?
- CamperBob2 14y ago
  It's not, at least on MSVC, unless you have a lot of inline asm in your C/C++ codebase. You change a couple of -D flags on the compiler and linker command lines and build with the 64-bit compiler. A few Win32 calls and data types will need to be changed. If you're in the habit of casting pointers to ints or vice versa, you'll need to change those ints to size_t or equivalent types, as you should have been doing all along. Few/no Windows developers should be treating their 32-bit builds as their primary target at this point, unless (as in Mozilla's case) they need to interface with a lot of legacy 32-bit plugins. The correct course of action for Mozilla would be to pressure the plugin developers, though, rather than to put the horse in front of the cart as they're doing. They could have made the same call in the Windows 95 days, when 16-bit code was still viable. It would have been silly then, and it's silly now.
  - Derbasti 14y ago
    That does not seem to explain why 64 bit is apparently more problematic on Windows than on other platforms. Could you elaborate on that?
    - CamperBob2 14y ago
      Sorry, I have no idea where they're coming from when they say that. It's got to come down to plugin compatibility. In fact -- again, for MSVC projects -- debugging a 32-bit application on a 64-bit PC is what's painful. There are serious bugs in Visual Studio's WoW64 support that have remained unfixed for years.
  - iSnow 14y ago
    >rather than to put the horse in front of the cart as they're doing As a non-native speaker, I am confused. Over here, we put the horse in front of the cart back when we still used carts and horses. Makes more sense to me.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
darshan 14y ago
The headline is completely wrong and somehow links to something that isn't the actual discussion, which is here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.apps.firefox/jpX_z5zieD4 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.apps.fir... Here's further explanation from the opening poster of that thread: For the purposes of this thread, it is already a done decision that we aren't going to ship 64-bit Windows Firefox builds in the first half of 2013, and probably not at all in 2013. In the meantime, we aren't going to fix crashes or plugin bugs that only affect 64-bit builds. Those decisions have already been made. The only question to decide here is whether the existing 64-bit Windows nightlies provide any value to the project. They're not discontinuing 64-bit Firefox on Windows; they haven't even released it yet. They do intend to release it, but probably not until 2014.
- mappu 14y ago
  It's been mentioned already - the submission links just to the announcement. I understand and sympathise with all the technical reasons behind the decision. But i still consider it a serious regression on Mozilla's behalf, and it's a major disruption for every single user who used this configuration. I'm happy for a moderator to change the post title if it's too inflammatory, "Discontinued" was perhaps too strong a word. How about "64-bit Firefox no longer available for Windows"?
- wtallis 14y ago
  I think it's a stretch to say that they do intend to release a win64 version. I think that, while they may not have ruled out ever doing such a thing, it's pretty clear that since they are not working on 64-bit bugs they have no plans to get any win64 builds ready for release.
CamperBob2 14y ago
Terrible decisionmaking on Mozilla's part. Can you even buy a 32-bit Windows PC anymore? Those developers who are asserting that there are no advantages to a 64-bit executable besides RAM addressability are simply wrong. Any nontrivial MSVC C/C++ application will gain about 5-10% performance when recompiled to target x64. Why, I don't know, but that's what happens in my experience. It could be that having eight additional 64-bit registers available to the compiler overcomes the L1$ penalty associated with larger pointers. Point being, 64-bit executables are the current best practice in Windows programming, beyond any possible debate. This is just yet another move up the shark-fin curve on Mozilla's part.
flashcansuckit 14y ago
This is going to sound crazy, but I was running 64bit nightly (on windows 8) and didnt have a single problem until I read this article... Immediately after following some of the links to the discussions on google groups, firefox crashed twice, and then also prompted me to update again... Anyone know how to tell if if the version of firefox has been force-updated to 32bit (the about dialog does not seem to indicate which platform I am using). Also, I don't have any plugins installed. The only plugin I used before I upgraded to windows 8 was flash, and now that HTML5 video is pretty main-stream, and WebGL is on its way, I don't see myself ever installing flash plugin again...
- padenot 14y ago
  You can type about:buildconfig in you address bar to see info about a particular Firefox build.
peterbe 14y ago
http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/64-bit-support http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/64-bit-s...

50 points by mappu 14y ago

mappu 14y ago

Following a curiously short discussion, and despite 50% of Nightly testers on windows using the 64-bit builds[1] and a Windows user demonstrating firefox using 10GB of memory[2] (above the address space limit of 32-bit), the 64-bit nightly builds of Firefox on Windows are to be discontinued. _______________________________ 1. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=814009 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=814009 2. http://archive.installgentoo.net/g/thread/29261499 http://archive.installgentoo.net/g/thread/29261499 3. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.apps.firefox/jpX_z5zieD4 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.apps.fir... - Full discussion thread

RossDM 14y ago
Heh, that comment thread pretty much sums it up. Shame to see this happen.
benth 14y ago
Misleading headline and obviously you know it.
ajryan 14y ago
Seems like it would be better to focus on the single problem of not crossing the 32-bit address boundary rather than the multitude of x64 problems.
- shardling 14y ago
  That's not really possible -- you'll see that the folk crossing that boundary are keeping open several hundreds of tabs at a time. As memory usage is reduced, these folk will just open more tabs.
DanBC 14y ago
In case it's not obvious: [2] links to a chan style discussion board, with chan style culture. The first thing I read (because it's in big red letters) was "I WANT TO REMIND YOU THAT CP IS NOT TOLERATED AND MUST BE REPORTED".
- mappu 14y ago
  Sorry, possibly could have made that more clear (it's also not affiliated with Gentoo). In defense of 4chan, the exact same rule applies to HN (the law applies to everyone), every large website has trouble with spam, and there's nothing offensive there outside of mild profanity and teenagerism. It's otherwise a perfectly ordinary technical discussion thread from a board that has a large number of firefox users and where Nightly is strongly encouraged amongst PC enthusiasts.
  - DanBC 14y ago
    Yes, I agree. I was perhaps a bit sniffy. Often great discussion can be found on those style boards.

shritesh 14y ago

I was really looking forward to the 64-bit version but it never looked as if Mozilla was ever serious about it.

ajryan 14y ago
What did you need that only x64 could provide?
- barrkel 14y ago
  My desktop has 24GB of RAM, yet Firefox crashes on a regular basis when it bounces off its 2GB limit, usually when many image-heavy pages are opened, especially simultaneously from a folder of bookmarks. Seems like the single simplest thing to fix this is the option of using a 64-bit binary, given that it appears most of the work is already done. The alternative is to break up the browser into multiple processes, much like Chrome. That would however reduce the distinctiveness of Firefox and be one less reason to keep using it. Though the reliability effects of using multiple processes is probably better in the end. But sooner or later - sooner if various GL things ever get proper uptake - individual web pages are going to need more than 2GB to display and run. The bullet will need to be bitten, even in a multi-process model.
  - Dylan16807 14y ago
    2GB limit? Unless something went wrong on your system firefox should be marked as large address aware and get 4GB. I'm impressed that you've gotten a browser that big on normal pages. I've only gotten it on ridiculously huge test pages or from memory leaking over time.
    - gryph0n 14y ago
      I run into the 2G limit very frequently too. I usually shutdown my home & work systems only once a week. Firefox too runs continuously from the 1st day of the week. Over the duration of a week, as I open more webpages, the virtual memory consumption rises continuously till it hits the 2G limit and then the process kills itself. Usually during the last few hundred MB before the 2G limit, it becomes pretty unresponsive. I believe you're referring to the linker options for large memory awareness http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wz223b1z%28v=vs.80%29.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wz223b1z%28v=vs.80%2... I'd be glad if as a user (not developer) I can set that option somewhere. P.S., I am a developer, but over time, you learn that building unfamiliar codebases is not a trivial exercise. On Win32, I'm just happier downloading vendor provided binaries. On Linux, I can be both, happy and frustrated, building my own binaries with Gentoo.

JohnTHaller 14y ago

As mentioned in the bug and other locations, Firefox's x64 builds are pre-release nightlies only and not anywhere near ready for primetime. They still get a lot of bug reports that are x64 only and don't have resources dedicated to it because Firefox OS and Metro mode have higher priorities. For folks in the bug saying that this will make them somehow abandon Firefox, if 64-bit is really that important to them, they'll have to use Internet Explorer only and deal with many popular plugins not working (Adobe Reader, Quicktime, etc). Opera has an experimental Win64 build from February that is now out of date with known security issues. No further progress has been made or release schedule announced. Chrome, Chromium and Iron are 32-bit only and have no 64-bit builds, not even pre-alpha experimental ones. Apple has abandoned Safari for Windows entirely. So, as far as 64-bit browsers on Windows... you've got IE and that's it. UPDATE: As correctly pointed out below, there is a snapshot (alpha, incomplete, unstable) build of current Opera for Win x64. Apologies on the incomplete information in this post originally.

barrkel 14y ago
Plugins not working is a security / reliability bonus, from my perspective; every few months, I have to hunt them down and delete / disable them. At least it's easier to disable them in Firefox than in Chrome.
- mh- 14y ago
  chrome://plugins
Osiris 14y ago
Your information about Opera is incorrect. The current release (12.11) has a x64 build (http://snapshot.opera.com/12.11-1661_windows.html http://snapshot.opera.com/12.11-1661_windows.html). Why the downvote? The link takes you to the download for the 64-bit Windows version that was just released
- JohnTHaller 14y ago
  I stand corrected, I was basing it on the out of process plugins page that they used to keep updated: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/64-bit-opera-and-out-of-process-plug-ins/ http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/64-bit-opera-and-out-of-p... Opera does have a Snapshot Win x64 build available which they describe as "Cutting edge, alpha quality, incomplete, and often contain critical bugs". This does sound a lot like the now-discontinued Firefox Win x64 nightlies (aka nowhere near stable). (PS - You get an upvote from me. Not sure why someone downvoted you.)

csense 14y ago

This decision makes no sense. I figure that, sometime in the next 10 years, 32-bit OS'es will go the way of 16-bit OS'es. The time to iron out the bugs in the 64-bit version is now, while it's only used by diehard techies who understand the necessity of switching to 64-bit. If we wait until the unwashed masses are forced to switch by ever-advancing technology, they'll jump ship for browsers that have been preparing for years. Also, the fact that the link has exactly one post in between the proposal and the switch tells me that nobody noticed it, and more effort should have been made to get community review, buy-in, sign-offs. There should have been lots of commentary and input on such a fundamental feature as 64-bit support in such a high-profile open-source project.

mappu 14y ago
Agreed. To be fair, there was some small amount more commentary. See the other post for more links - the submission points simply to the announcement thread.
kelnos 14y ago
The real discussion is here (~40 messages): https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.apps.firefox/jpX_z5zieD4 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.apps.fir... The poster asked that people follow up in a different newsgroup.
pyre 14y ago
To be fair, as others have mentioned Chrome doesn't even have a pre-Alpha 64-bit version, and a number of plugins don't work with 64-bit browsers. Sometimes you have to pick your battles, it's not like Mozilla has infinite resources.
- justinschuh 14y ago
  I'm one of the leads for the 64-bit Chrome on Windows work, and it is very much underway. I can't commit to a timeline, but we are attacking this pretty aggressively right now because it's a nice win on both the security and performance fronts. I'm a bit shocked to see Firefox moving in the opposite direction.

T-Winsnes 14y ago

There is always waterfox for 64bit http://www.waterfoxproject.org/ http://www.waterfoxproject.org/

nextw33k 14y ago
I used Waterfox for about 6months. It was perfect, until I found out that 32bit Firefox is faster in the benchmarks. 64bit applications are not always better. It actually can waste resources in some applications. My IM and Text editor are 32bit and there is no reason for them to be 64bit.
- T-Winsnes 14y ago
  I agree, if you're not touching the memory limits of 32bit, there is no reason to do 64bit. Because 64bit applications have to pass 64bit addresses to read from memory it is slower than 32bit which only have to pass 32bits of data (simplified but true).

DanBC 14y ago

It seems that the only people who need 64 bit browsers are those who have very many tabs open. I don't understand that use case. I don't understand how someone can work with 500 tabs open. Why do you run a browser with very many tabs open? Or do you need 64 bit for some other reason? EDIT for the silent downvoters: I'm not criticising people who have very many tabs open. Nor am I saying that's the only reason to have 64 bit browser.

iSnow 14y ago
Some people (like me) have stopped using bookmarks and simply leave open interesting pages. I have ~20 browser windows open, each window is a virtual workplace. One is political news, one is tech news (featuring hacker news, the Register, slashdot, appleinsider...) one is Java SE API tabs, one is Clojure, one is imageboards. While 500 tabs is a bit much, I can easily get to 200 without getting lost. It is simply a way to organize my stuff. Had one window with several tabs open for Scala, then found that Scala is not for me. Closed that window and it is all gone. No need to fiddle with bookmarks. That said, the missing 64bit support will surely not make me leave Firefox. After all, it will surely come back over time.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  You might like a tree-tabs plugin of some sort. Makes the tab bar run vertically along one size and tabs open into a collapsible tree structure; I find it very nice for handling hundreds of tabs.
justinschuh 14y ago
On Chrome we don't need it for large numbers of tabs (because our multi-process architecture covers that). However, we're working on it because we've identified significant security benefits (e.g. much better ASLR) and improved performance in a number of scenarios (mostly due to the additional registers).
jlgreco 14y ago
If I have the ram.. why not use it? Putty and Outlook can sop up the remains, but the bulk of my memory is either going to be used for my browser.. or wasted. High numbers of tabs certainly isn't a usage pattern that is for everybody.. but clearly there are many of us who use it.

Derbasti 14y ago

Could someone enlighten me why 64 bit seems to be so hard to do on Windows as compared to other platforms?

CamperBob2 14y ago
It's not, at least on MSVC, unless you have a lot of inline asm in your C/C++ codebase. You change a couple of -D flags on the compiler and linker command lines and build with the 64-bit compiler. A few Win32 calls and data types will need to be changed. If you're in the habit of casting pointers to ints or vice versa, you'll need to change those ints to size_t or equivalent types, as you should have been doing all along. Few/no Windows developers should be treating their 32-bit builds as their primary target at this point, unless (as in Mozilla's case) they need to interface with a lot of legacy 32-bit plugins. The correct course of action for Mozilla would be to pressure the plugin developers, though, rather than to put the horse in front of the cart as they're doing. They could have made the same call in the Windows 95 days, when 16-bit code was still viable. It would have been silly then, and it's silly now.
- Derbasti 14y ago
  That does not seem to explain why 64 bit is apparently more problematic on Windows than on other platforms. Could you elaborate on that?
  - CamperBob2 14y ago
    Sorry, I have no idea where they're coming from when they say that. It's got to come down to plugin compatibility. In fact -- again, for MSVC projects -- debugging a 32-bit application on a 64-bit PC is what's painful. There are serious bugs in Visual Studio's WoW64 support that have remained unfixed for years.
- iSnow 14y ago
  >rather than to put the horse in front of the cart as they're doing As a non-native speaker, I am confused. Over here, we put the horse in front of the cart back when we still used carts and horses. Makes more sense to me.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

darshan 14y ago

The headline is completely wrong and somehow links to something that isn't the actual discussion, which is here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.apps.firefox/jpX_z5zieD4 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.apps.fir... Here's further explanation from the opening poster of that thread: For the purposes of this thread, it is already a done decision that we aren't going to ship 64-bit Windows Firefox builds in the first half of 2013, and probably not at all in 2013. In the meantime, we aren't going to fix crashes or plugin bugs that only affect 64-bit builds. Those decisions have already been made. The only question to decide here is whether the existing 64-bit Windows nightlies provide any value to the project. They're not discontinuing 64-bit Firefox on Windows; they haven't even released it yet. They do intend to release it, but probably not until 2014.

mappu 14y ago
It's been mentioned already - the submission links just to the announcement. I understand and sympathise with all the technical reasons behind the decision. But i still consider it a serious regression on Mozilla's behalf, and it's a major disruption for every single user who used this configuration. I'm happy for a moderator to change the post title if it's too inflammatory, "Discontinued" was perhaps too strong a word. How about "64-bit Firefox no longer available for Windows"?
wtallis 14y ago
I think it's a stretch to say that they do intend to release a win64 version. I think that, while they may not have ruled out ever doing such a thing, it's pretty clear that since they are not working on 64-bit bugs they have no plans to get any win64 builds ready for release.

CamperBob2 14y ago

Terrible decisionmaking on Mozilla's part. Can you even buy a 32-bit Windows PC anymore? Those developers who are asserting that there are no advantages to a 64-bit executable besides RAM addressability are simply wrong. Any nontrivial MSVC C/C++ application will gain about 5-10% performance when recompiled to target x64. Why, I don't know, but that's what happens in my experience. It could be that having eight additional 64-bit registers available to the compiler overcomes the L1$ penalty associated with larger pointers. Point being, 64-bit executables are the current best practice in Windows programming, beyond any possible debate. This is just yet another move up the shark-fin curve on Mozilla's part.

flashcansuckit 14y ago

This is going to sound crazy, but I was running 64bit nightly (on windows 8) and didnt have a single problem until I read this article... Immediately after following some of the links to the discussions on google groups, firefox crashed twice, and then also prompted me to update again... Anyone know how to tell if if the version of firefox has been force-updated to 32bit (the about dialog does not seem to indicate which platform I am using). Also, I don't have any plugins installed. The only plugin I used before I upgraded to windows 8 was flash, and now that HTML5 video is pretty main-stream, and WebGL is on its way, I don't see myself ever installing flash plugin again...

padenot 14y ago
You can type about:buildconfig in you address bar to see info about a particular Firefox build.

peterbe 14y ago

http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/64-bit-support http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/64-bit-s...