

64-bit Firefox discontinued on Windows - mappu
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.planning/EmXonELGjVM/discussion

======
JohnTHaller
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Opera has an experimental Win64 build from February that is now out of date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.

~~~
Osiris
Your information about Opera is incorrect. The current release (12.11) has a
x64 build (<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
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-p...](http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/64-bit-opera-and-out-of-
process-plug-ins/)

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.)

~~~
anonymfus
Download button on main page of www.opera.com provides x64 version for me if I
use browser with Win64 and x64 in user agent

[http://www.opera.com/download/get.pl?id=35259&thanks=tru...](http://www.opera.com/download/get.pl?id=35259&thanks=true&sub=true)

It is not experimental.

------
mappu
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>

2\. <http://archive.installgentoo.net/g/thread/29261499>

3\.
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.apps.fir...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.apps.firefox/jpX_z5zieD4)
\- Full discussion thread

~~~
DanBC
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
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
Yes, I agree. I was perhaps a bit sniffy. Often great discussion can be found
on those style boards.

------
csense
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.

~~~
pyre
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
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.

~~~
cpeterso
Are the 64-bit challenges on Windows much different than OS X or Linux? Chrome
for OS X is also 32-bit, but Firefox is 64-bit.

~~~
yuhong
Some differences include the need for JITs to generate proper unwind tables
for SEH to work properly.

~~~
gsnedders
As well as a different calling convention.

------
darshan
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.fir...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.apps.firefox/jpX_z5zieD4)

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
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"?

------
CamperBob2
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.

------
DanBC
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
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
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.

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

~~~
CamperBob2
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.

~~~
iSnow
>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.

~~~
codeka
The expression is "to put the cart before the horse", i.e. do things in the
wrong order.

------
T-Winsnes
There is always waterfox for 64bit <http://www.waterfoxproject.org/>

~~~
nextw33k
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
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).

------
flashcansuckit
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
You can type about:buildconfig in you address bar to see info about a
particular Firefox build.

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

~~~
shardling
What was the advantage you saw in it?

From the brief discussion, it sounds like it had inferior performance to the
32 bit builds, and was buggier to boot.

~~~
shritesh
Yeah, that was the problem. Downloading from the servers, I tended to choose
the x64 version and it was never good. The x86 always have been better.

------
peterbe
[http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-
documents/64-bit-s...](http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-
documents/64-bit-support)

