9 ms·

Firefox Developer Edition 38: 64-bits and more

184 points by gulbrandr 12y ago

frozenport 12y ago
Was Firefox for Linux x64?
- en4bz 12y ago
  Seems to be 64 bit on Ubuntu 14.10 $ readelf -h /usr/lib/firefox/firefox ELF Header: Magic: 7f 45 4c 46 02 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 Class: ELF64 Data: 2's complement, little endian Version: 1 (current) OS/ABI: UNIX - System V ABI Version: 0 Type: DYN (Shared object file) Machine: Advanced Micro Devices X86-64
  - Thaxll 12y ago
    Or just use file: file /usr/lib/firefox/firefox /usr/lib/firefox/firefox: ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.32, BuildID[sha1]=16336605009f841acd45261f5f904be8509cfe21, stripped
- shmerl 12y ago
  I use it for years on Linux already. I didn't even know on Windows Firefox wasn't 64 bit yet.
- cesarb 12y ago
  Firefox has been available both as 32-bit and 64-bit on Linux for a long time. Quoting myself (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8629233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8629233): ---- From what I have read, for software which wasn't originally developed for Windows, especially if the code base is old enough, porting to 64-bit is harder on Windows than on other systems. The problem is that, while the Unix-based world went the LP64 way (int is 32-bit, long and pointers are 64-bit), Windows went the LLP64 way (int and long are 32-bit, pointers are 64-bit). A lot of Unix programmers tended to behave as if "long" was the largest native type ("long long" on 32-bit uses a pair of registers). They have to scrub their whole code base for things like assuming an object's size or array index will always fit on a "long". ---- For Firefox, there's the additional problem of plugins. For a long time, plugins on Windows have been 32-bit, and also for a long time, plugins for Firefox on Windows (and other operating systems) were in-process, so it wasn't possible to use a 32-bit plugin with a 64-bit browser. Nowadays, not only can Firefox use a separate process for plugins, but also the whole idea of browser plugins seems to be dying, so it's less of a problem.
  - jheriko 12y ago
    the whole LP64 vs LLP64 'issue' is a massive red herring. even in the most despicable code bases this is relatively quick and easy to 'fix', its just one of those things that on the face of it looks like a lot of work, and is genuinely a brainless chore of find and replace with care. its worth doing right anyway for plenty of reasons beyond portability, like readability and maintainability. using long on its own imo is a code smell. except for android (and maybe linux, i can't remember otoh) long long is 64-bit and int is 32. but more generally you can macro it away or use some standard size type header and do the replacements to fix it. the real problems i've seen with 64-bit portability are from bad serialisation code, where struct padding breaks things, and hacks that rely on pointer casts to ints etc. those are less easy because you can't find/replace them and so it requires thought, not just care, to remove those issues safely.
  - dblohm7 12y ago
    The JIT needed some fixing to work correctly with SEH on Win64.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Wow, that is pretty cool. At what point is a browser indistinguishable from an emulated virtual computer?
- interknot 12y ago
  That's a pretty interesting way to think of it. The only other platforms (AFAIK) that come close would be the JVM and Mono/CLR. But the browser is more like a user-facing, interactive JVM/etc.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  I'm still rather incredulous about the whole idea. I think to myself, if this is the best way to do things, we must be missing something. Though, I can't put my finger on why JVM seems reasonable while BrowserVM doesn't.
  - TheDong 12y ago
    I think it's a matter of design. The Smalltalk integrated environment feels completely right and was designed wonderfully with that intent in mind. The JVM, likewise, has had a consistent and clear scope throughout. Browsers are still not fully scoped out. From year to year, it varies what webapps can do and what the norm is. Furthermore, it was not originally designed with this usecase in mind. All those contribute to it feeling a lot more awkward for this purpose than other, better designed, solutions. Also, JVM/Pharo have significantly smaller scopes which helps.
  - Someone 12y ago
    Because tying your VM to a single application and it's user interface library (DOM/css, in this case) doesn't feel right?
- zobzu 12y ago
  Sounds like FirefoxOS.
- frozenport 12y ago
  When you can run assembly on it, unless of course you are emulating a computer without assembly...
greenyoda 12y ago
64-bit Windows builds of Firefox have been available for quite a while from the Waterfox Project: https://www.waterfoxproject.org https://www.waterfoxproject.org
- JohnTHaller 12y ago
  These are the first official Firefox builds from Mozilla other than Nightlies. Before this, Mozilla didn't feel the 64-bit code was stable enough. Waterfox took the existing code and compiled it for 64-bit, but all the existing issues and bugs were present.
- getsat 12y ago
  Holy crap, this is so much faster than Firefox. Lifesaver. Thanks!
  - Dylan16807 12y ago
    You're similar versions with the same profile or both blank profiles? How much faster, how can you tell?
    - getsat 12y ago
      Same versions, same profiles, same # of bookmarks (hundreds), same # of plugins (adblock, ghostery, a few others). Pages render a lot snappier and there's no scrolling lag in Waterfox vs Firefox. This is great.
- m3Lith 12y ago
  On the same note, it's worth mentioning Palemoon: http://www.palemoon.org/ http://www.palemoon.org/
  - darklajid 12y ago
    No, it's not. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8683630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8683630
thristian 12y ago
From the changelog: > autocomplete=off is no longer supported for username/password fields As far as I can recall, autocomplete=off was originally added specifically for username and password fields, so somebody who nicked your laptop couldn't go to your bank's website and have your username and password filled in. As a power user I find autocomplete=off pretty annoying, but I've got ways to work around it. I'm very curious what the rationale for this change is.
- openjck 12y ago
  Lots of great discussion in the bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=956906 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=956906
  - ploxiln 12y ago
    quote near end for the many people who won't read the thread: - This change makes it so that `autocomplete=off` does not stop the Password Manager from working. Normal form autofill can be disabled as usual. - The password manager *always* prompts if it wants to save a password. Passwords are not saved without permission from the user. - We are the third browser to implement this change, after IE and Chrome. More clarification: password type input elements already never autofill/autocomplete like other input elements do. autocomplete=off on password type input elements just makes password managers not work (until this change). Other input elements still honor autocomplete=off.
  - fpgeek 12y ago
    Lots of great discussion, but also lots of exasperating third-party comments. While reading some of them I wanted to shake the authors and scream: "A website can't stop a user from saving a password! All you're doing is making them save it on a Post-It instead of in their password manager!"
- leeoniya 12y ago
  for backend admin, when creating usernames and passwords for new users, you dont want those saved in your own browser. pretty much the only use-case i've run into and can think of.
bhouston 12y ago
This is much needed for us at http://Clara.io http://Clara.io. We have for the last 8 months been detecting when users who are using 32 bit desktop browsers and have been putting up in-app warnings directing people to upgrade to 64 bit versions. Our forum post about the issue: http://forum.clara.io/t/information-on-64-bit-web-browsers/979 http://forum.clara.io/t/information-on-64-bit-web-browsers/9...
- voltagex_ 12y ago
  Do you have any stats on people who went away and installed a 64 bit browser? clara.io's audience would be highly technical but I don't think you'd get away with asking many people to install a new browser these days.
  - bhouston 12y ago
    We don't force them. We just recommend it for best experiences. It really does make a difference. We have google analytics but I am unsure if it tracks this automatically. We do not manually track it I believe.
angersock 12y ago
Nifty, but unfortunately we're still kinda limited to 32-bit addressing in typed arrays. It'd be nice if JS had an actual integer type that went up to 64 bits.
- azakai 12y ago
  32-bit is enough for a 4GB typed array, which doesn't seem too bad. I imagine eventually it will be limiting, but not in the near future.
  - AceJohnny2 12y ago
    32-bits should be enough for everyone! Sorry, I couldn't help myself ;) (and I know your "not in the near future" makes the comparison incorrect anyhow)
    - Dylan16807 12y ago
      Thing is it's easy to need more than XX bits of stuff total, it's a lot rarer to want that in a single array in a high level language.
    - userbinator 12y ago
      32-bit CPUs lasted for several decades in desktop computers, and I don't see it going away anytime soon. Personally, I think a lot of what average users are using computers for at the moment wouldn't need anything more than that. In most cases, 4GB is still a lot of memory... but it's easy to waste.
  - angersock 12y ago
    I mean, the super gnarly thing here is eventually emulating an MMU in JS, right? Like, this almost gets us back to the nastiness of segmented memory models--you end up having the 32-bit addressable typed array as the "physical" memory, and then has the VMMU (virtual memory-management unit?) handle mapping from a virtual address (maybe a string?) to one of the physical addresses, and handling pagefaults. Actually, that sounds kind of sexy, if anyone wants to bullshit on a PoC hack, shoot me an email.
cabirum 12y ago
2 years 3 mons 11 days http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/11/22/mozilla-quietly-kills-firefox-64-bit-for-windows-despite-an-alleged-50-of-testers-using-it/ http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/11/22/mozilla-quietly-kills-...
- Dylan16807 12y ago
  http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/12/22/mozilla-backpedals-on-firefox-64-bit-for-windows-will-keep-nightly-builds-coming-after-all/ http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/12/22/mozilla-backpedals-on-... Didn't happen. And support and stability has been growing.
nnethercote 12y ago
64-bit Windows builds, finally! This is great news. The rate of (virtual) OOM crashes on Windows is pretty high because a 32-bit address space just isn't enough for many workloads these days, and 64-bit builds solves that problem definitely.
- nextw33k 12y ago
  What? You are using more than 3.5GB of memory for your browser? I consider myself a heavy user with 20-30 tabs open at any one time. I used to have a 2GB memory usage with Adblock Plus and since switching to uBlock it averages 0.6GB of RAM. 64bit will open more address space but it has proven in the past to slow the browser down, the wider memory pointer size has a detrimental effect, Waterfox is Firefox recompiled as 64bit and other compiler optimisations: http://www.networkworld.com/article/2185649/applications/fast-firefox-faceoff--nightly-vs--pale-moon-vs--waterfox.html http://www.networkworld.com/article/2185649/applications/fas... Not everything should be 64bit.
  - tyrfing 12y ago
    Yeah, I regularly hit 3gb+ even with uBlock. Counting, I have about 30 loaded tabs right now (it's usually more like 100+ when I'm in the middle of doing something), a few hundred unloaded, and 1800 MB RAM used. The tabs tend to pile up when the browser eventually crashes... This is with tree style tabs, which makes browsing so much more efficient for me that Firefox is the only viable option.
  - Sami_Lehtinen 12y ago
    Just open a few dozen tabs with high resolution images and 4 Gigs is gone quickly. It can come as surprise, I was also surprised when that happened first time. Luckily I was using 64 bit version but serious swapping started to lag my system.
- Sami_Lehtinen 12y ago
  I've been using 64bit version since 2006 on Linux. But if I don't remember wrong IE has been available as 64 bit version much longer. Xp 64 and 2003 Server used to use 64 bit IE6.
wluu 12y ago
From the comments, if you've got the 32bit version installed and want to install the 64bit version (basically, it's not an update from one to the other): – Uninstall Win32 – Don’t remove your profile – Install Win64 (it’s a full installer vs. a update)
geeknik 12y ago
Been using 64 bit Nightly builds (from Mozilla) for years. Not sure why this is news.
- dblohm7 12y ago
  Win64 builds have not been available in channels beyond Nightly until now. That's why it is news.
ilaksh 12y ago
I just want a browser that runs on Android with developer tools built in.
yuhong 12y ago
BTW, fixing open source JITs to support Windows x64 SEH properly is on my wishlist for MS Open Tech.
Animats 12y ago
Now, there's no limit to how much memory the browser can consume. I hope this doesn't turn into a license to bloat.
mikko-apo 12y ago
Chrome displays if the browser is 64bit in its about box, but for Firefox that information is a bit harder to find out. It's in about:buildconfig
andor 12y ago
If you haven’t downloaded the Developer Edition browser yet, it’s a fine time to give it a try. Here’s why: Aha, so where can I try that Unreal Engine 4 demo myself?

184 points by gulbrandr 12y ago

frozenport 12y ago

Was Firefox for Linux x64?

en4bz 12y ago
Seems to be 64 bit on Ubuntu 14.10 $ readelf -h /usr/lib/firefox/firefox ELF Header: Magic: 7f 45 4c 46 02 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 Class: ELF64 Data: 2's complement, little endian Version: 1 (current) OS/ABI: UNIX - System V ABI Version: 0 Type: DYN (Shared object file) Machine: Advanced Micro Devices X86-64
- Thaxll 12y ago
  Or just use file: file /usr/lib/firefox/firefox /usr/lib/firefox/firefox: ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.32, BuildID[sha1]=16336605009f841acd45261f5f904be8509cfe21, stripped
shmerl 12y ago
I use it for years on Linux already. I didn't even know on Windows Firefox wasn't 64 bit yet.
cesarb 12y ago
Firefox has been available both as 32-bit and 64-bit on Linux for a long time. Quoting myself (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8629233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8629233): ---- From what I have read, for software which wasn't originally developed for Windows, especially if the code base is old enough, porting to 64-bit is harder on Windows than on other systems. The problem is that, while the Unix-based world went the LP64 way (int is 32-bit, long and pointers are 64-bit), Windows went the LLP64 way (int and long are 32-bit, pointers are 64-bit). A lot of Unix programmers tended to behave as if "long" was the largest native type ("long long" on 32-bit uses a pair of registers). They have to scrub their whole code base for things like assuming an object's size or array index will always fit on a "long". ---- For Firefox, there's the additional problem of plugins. For a long time, plugins on Windows have been 32-bit, and also for a long time, plugins for Firefox on Windows (and other operating systems) were in-process, so it wasn't possible to use a 32-bit plugin with a 64-bit browser. Nowadays, not only can Firefox use a separate process for plugins, but also the whole idea of browser plugins seems to be dying, so it's less of a problem.
- jheriko 12y ago
  the whole LP64 vs LLP64 'issue' is a massive red herring. even in the most despicable code bases this is relatively quick and easy to 'fix', its just one of those things that on the face of it looks like a lot of work, and is genuinely a brainless chore of find and replace with care. its worth doing right anyway for plenty of reasons beyond portability, like readability and maintainability. using long on its own imo is a code smell. except for android (and maybe linux, i can't remember otoh) long long is 64-bit and int is 32. but more generally you can macro it away or use some standard size type header and do the replacements to fix it. the real problems i've seen with 64-bit portability are from bad serialisation code, where struct padding breaks things, and hacks that rely on pointer casts to ints etc. those are less easy because you can't find/replace them and so it requires thought, not just care, to remove those issues safely.
- dblohm7 12y ago
  The JIT needed some fixing to work correctly with SEH on Win64.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

Wow, that is pretty cool. At what point is a browser indistinguishable from an emulated virtual computer?

interknot 12y ago
That's a pretty interesting way to think of it. The only other platforms (AFAIK) that come close would be the JVM and Mono/CLR. But the browser is more like a user-facing, interactive JVM/etc.
sliverstorm 12y ago
I'm still rather incredulous about the whole idea. I think to myself, if this is the best way to do things, we must be missing something. Though, I can't put my finger on why JVM seems reasonable while BrowserVM doesn't.
- TheDong 12y ago
  I think it's a matter of design. The Smalltalk integrated environment feels completely right and was designed wonderfully with that intent in mind. The JVM, likewise, has had a consistent and clear scope throughout. Browsers are still not fully scoped out. From year to year, it varies what webapps can do and what the norm is. Furthermore, it was not originally designed with this usecase in mind. All those contribute to it feeling a lot more awkward for this purpose than other, better designed, solutions. Also, JVM/Pharo have significantly smaller scopes which helps.
- Someone 12y ago
  Because tying your VM to a single application and it's user interface library (DOM/css, in this case) doesn't feel right?
zobzu 12y ago
Sounds like FirefoxOS.
frozenport 12y ago
When you can run assembly on it, unless of course you are emulating a computer without assembly...

greenyoda 12y ago

64-bit Windows builds of Firefox have been available for quite a while from the Waterfox Project: https://www.waterfoxproject.org https://www.waterfoxproject.org

JohnTHaller 12y ago
These are the first official Firefox builds from Mozilla other than Nightlies. Before this, Mozilla didn't feel the 64-bit code was stable enough. Waterfox took the existing code and compiled it for 64-bit, but all the existing issues and bugs were present.
getsat 12y ago
Holy crap, this is so much faster than Firefox. Lifesaver. Thanks!
- Dylan16807 12y ago
  You're similar versions with the same profile or both blank profiles? How much faster, how can you tell?
  - getsat 12y ago
    Same versions, same profiles, same # of bookmarks (hundreds), same # of plugins (adblock, ghostery, a few others). Pages render a lot snappier and there's no scrolling lag in Waterfox vs Firefox. This is great.
m3Lith 12y ago
On the same note, it's worth mentioning Palemoon: http://www.palemoon.org/ http://www.palemoon.org/
- darklajid 12y ago
  No, it's not. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8683630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8683630

thristian 12y ago

From the changelog: > autocomplete=off is no longer supported for username/password fields As far as I can recall, autocomplete=off was originally added specifically for username and password fields, so somebody who nicked your laptop couldn't go to your bank's website and have your username and password filled in. As a power user I find autocomplete=off pretty annoying, but I've got ways to work around it. I'm very curious what the rationale for this change is.

openjck 12y ago
Lots of great discussion in the bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=956906 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=956906
- ploxiln 12y ago
  quote near end for the many people who won't read the thread: - This change makes it so that `autocomplete=off` does not stop the Password Manager from working. Normal form autofill can be disabled as usual. - The password manager *always* prompts if it wants to save a password. Passwords are not saved without permission from the user. - We are the third browser to implement this change, after IE and Chrome. More clarification: password type input elements already never autofill/autocomplete like other input elements do. autocomplete=off on password type input elements just makes password managers not work (until this change). Other input elements still honor autocomplete=off.
- fpgeek 12y ago
  Lots of great discussion, but also lots of exasperating third-party comments. While reading some of them I wanted to shake the authors and scream: "A website can't stop a user from saving a password! All you're doing is making them save it on a Post-It instead of in their password manager!"
leeoniya 12y ago
for backend admin, when creating usernames and passwords for new users, you dont want those saved in your own browser. pretty much the only use-case i've run into and can think of.

bhouston 12y ago

This is much needed for us at http://Clara.io http://Clara.io. We have for the last 8 months been detecting when users who are using 32 bit desktop browsers and have been putting up in-app warnings directing people to upgrade to 64 bit versions. Our forum post about the issue: http://forum.clara.io/t/information-on-64-bit-web-browsers/979 http://forum.clara.io/t/information-on-64-bit-web-browsers/9...

voltagex_ 12y ago
Do you have any stats on people who went away and installed a 64 bit browser? clara.io's audience would be highly technical but I don't think you'd get away with asking many people to install a new browser these days.
- bhouston 12y ago
  We don't force them. We just recommend it for best experiences. It really does make a difference. We have google analytics but I am unsure if it tracks this automatically. We do not manually track it I believe.

angersock 12y ago

Nifty, but unfortunately we're still kinda limited to 32-bit addressing in typed arrays. It'd be nice if JS had an actual integer type that went up to 64 bits.

azakai 12y ago
32-bit is enough for a 4GB typed array, which doesn't seem too bad. I imagine eventually it will be limiting, but not in the near future.
- AceJohnny2 12y ago
  32-bits should be enough for everyone! Sorry, I couldn't help myself ;) (and I know your "not in the near future" makes the comparison incorrect anyhow)
  - Dylan16807 12y ago
    Thing is it's easy to need more than XX bits of stuff total, it's a lot rarer to want that in a single array in a high level language.
  - userbinator 12y ago
    32-bit CPUs lasted for several decades in desktop computers, and I don't see it going away anytime soon. Personally, I think a lot of what average users are using computers for at the moment wouldn't need anything more than that. In most cases, 4GB is still a lot of memory... but it's easy to waste.
- angersock 12y ago
  I mean, the super gnarly thing here is eventually emulating an MMU in JS, right? Like, this almost gets us back to the nastiness of segmented memory models--you end up having the 32-bit addressable typed array as the "physical" memory, and then has the VMMU (virtual memory-management unit?) handle mapping from a virtual address (maybe a string?) to one of the physical addresses, and handling pagefaults. Actually, that sounds kind of sexy, if anyone wants to bullshit on a PoC hack, shoot me an email.

cabirum 12y ago

2 years 3 mons 11 days http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/11/22/mozilla-quietly-kills-firefox-64-bit-for-windows-despite-an-alleged-50-of-testers-using-it/ http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/11/22/mozilla-quietly-kills-...

Dylan16807 12y ago
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/12/22/mozilla-backpedals-on-firefox-64-bit-for-windows-will-keep-nightly-builds-coming-after-all/ http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/12/22/mozilla-backpedals-on-... Didn't happen. And support and stability has been growing.

nnethercote 12y ago

64-bit Windows builds, finally! This is great news. The rate of (virtual) OOM crashes on Windows is pretty high because a 32-bit address space just isn't enough for many workloads these days, and 64-bit builds solves that problem definitely.

nextw33k 12y ago
What? You are using more than 3.5GB of memory for your browser? I consider myself a heavy user with 20-30 tabs open at any one time. I used to have a 2GB memory usage with Adblock Plus and since switching to uBlock it averages 0.6GB of RAM. 64bit will open more address space but it has proven in the past to slow the browser down, the wider memory pointer size has a detrimental effect, Waterfox is Firefox recompiled as 64bit and other compiler optimisations: http://www.networkworld.com/article/2185649/applications/fast-firefox-faceoff--nightly-vs--pale-moon-vs--waterfox.html http://www.networkworld.com/article/2185649/applications/fas... Not everything should be 64bit.
- tyrfing 12y ago
  Yeah, I regularly hit 3gb+ even with uBlock. Counting, I have about 30 loaded tabs right now (it's usually more like 100+ when I'm in the middle of doing something), a few hundred unloaded, and 1800 MB RAM used. The tabs tend to pile up when the browser eventually crashes... This is with tree style tabs, which makes browsing so much more efficient for me that Firefox is the only viable option.
- Sami_Lehtinen 12y ago
  Just open a few dozen tabs with high resolution images and 4 Gigs is gone quickly. It can come as surprise, I was also surprised when that happened first time. Luckily I was using 64 bit version but serious swapping started to lag my system.
Sami_Lehtinen 12y ago
I've been using 64bit version since 2006 on Linux. But if I don't remember wrong IE has been available as 64 bit version much longer. Xp 64 and 2003 Server used to use 64 bit IE6.

wluu 12y ago

From the comments, if you've got the 32bit version installed and want to install the 64bit version (basically, it's not an update from one to the other): – Uninstall Win32 – Don’t remove your profile – Install Win64 (it’s a full installer vs. a update)

geeknik 12y ago

Been using 64 bit Nightly builds (from Mozilla) for years. Not sure why this is news.

dblohm7 12y ago
Win64 builds have not been available in channels beyond Nightly until now. That's why it is news.

ilaksh 12y ago

I just want a browser that runs on Android with developer tools built in.

yuhong 12y ago

BTW, fixing open source JITs to support Windows x64 SEH properly is on my wishlist for MS Open Tech.

Animats 12y ago

Now, there's no limit to how much memory the browser can consume. I hope this doesn't turn into a license to bloat.

mikko-apo 12y ago

Chrome displays if the browser is 64bit in its about box, but for Firefox that information is a bit harder to find out. It's in about:buildconfig

andor 12y ago

If you haven’t downloaded the Developer Edition browser yet, it’s a fine time to give it a try. Here’s why: Aha, so where can I try that Unreal Engine 4 demo myself?