
Mozilla brings back 64-bit builds of Firefox for Windows - cpeterso
https://groups.google.com/d/topic/mozilla.dev.apps.firefox/DOihL2429NM/discussion
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jlgreco
It still sounds like their focus really is not on 64-bit. That may be fine in
the past, or even today, but it _really_ doesn't seem forward facing at all.

Does anybody know if they are at least working toward separate processes per
tab? Continuing to focus on single process 32 bit seems like an absurd
strategic move.

~~~
mh-
<https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Status> (take note of the then-future
dates)

[http://www.2ality.com/2011/12/firefox-electrolysis-on-
hold.h...](http://www.2ality.com/2011/12/firefox-electrolysis-on-hold.html)

I wondered how they went so far off the rails and let this fall by the
wayside, not even updating the project status.

<http://www.2ality.com/2012/02/servo.html>

 _Mozilla had to find a replacement for C++ and chose Rust._

. . .

 _[Rust] Release 0.2, 2012-03-29:_

I'm trying to think of a nice way to say that it's maybe not a good idea to
invest in inventing a new language instead of focusing on your flagship
product.

~~~
mcpherrinm
First, Rust is a handful of people working on a research project.

Electrolysis was "put on hold" because there were better ways to make Firefox
a more responsive browser, now. That's projects snappy and supersnappy. See
<https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/Snappy> and <http://taras.glek.net/> and
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=718121> \-- the final bug being
what I think will make Firefox a great browser again.

~~~
wmf
I thought people want electrolysis or 64 bit because they have so many tabs
open that they run out of address space; no amount of snappiness will fix that
problem.

~~~
mcpherrinm
That's probably a valid concern, but it's at best a fringe requirement, I
would suspect, compared to the huge number of people who would want a snappier
browser. Electrolysis provided some benefits here, because less parts of the
browser would run in the same processes and threads.

Unlike the quip about working on Rust above, this is a matter of
prioritization of effort. I would not qualify myself as experienced enough to
make the decisions to run a project as large and with as many users as
Firefox, but I don't think that Mozilla is wrong here.

~~~
mapt
I and about half of the people I know regularly test the limits of how many
tabs they can keep open. The other half can't imagine doing so. I suspect this
is a sharp bifurcation of use case that the project leads have found
themselves on one side of, not a "fringe requirement."

------
marshray
_Most importantly, it seems that there are users who regularly run into the
4GB memory limits of 32-bit builds. These users often have hundreds or even
thousands of tabs._

Wow, and I thought _I_ was ADD!

~~~
sliverstorm
It still seems to me like, if you have thousands of open tabs, it is your
browsing habits that need to change- not Firefox. How often will you even look
at the 1,925th tab?

Firefox has a perfectly good bookmark system.

~~~
ANTSANTS
On my desktop (using Chrome), I have about 50 tabs open, which is apparently
using about 3 gigs of memory (EDIT: and certainly even more of the address
space when you count memory mapped files). Granted, I have heard that Firefox
uses less memory than Chromium these days, due to the multi-process overhead,
but nonetheless I imagine those numbers would be somewhat similar on Firefox.

Thousands of tabs may be a fringe use case, but clearly, you can approach the
32-bit address space limit under much more sensible loads.

~~~
asadotzler
My experience with 50 tabs open in Firefox and Chrome is that Chrome uses
about 75% more memory. You can test this yourself instead of guessing. Also,
people with 50 or more tabs open represent less than 1/4th of one percent of
Firefox users and I'd imagine that's roughly the same for Chrome and IE so I
think it's a stretch to call that a "sensible load". 50 tabs is an extreme
load and Firefox handles it better than Chrome in my experience.

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AndrewDucker
Great to see them listening to feedback there!

------
b3tta
Can someone explain me why it's so hard for Mozilla to have a x64 build? Why
is the core of Firefox not platform independent? I just don't get it.

~~~
mook
The code works fine (enough); that's why they will (now) ship nightlies of
Win64 builds. The problem is two-fold: 1) They don't want their engineers to
spend time fixing Win64 errors, and rely solely on people who care a lot about
Win64 (thanks, m_kato!) to clean up after the "normal" people. 2) For some
silly reason, they have nowhere near enough machines (and people to run them)
to properly support development. This is even ignoring Win64 builds - multiple
checkins will typically share an integration build, and checkins frequently
has to stop to back out a bad change and wait for the machines to catch up to
make sure the problem is fixed. They have a system (try servers) to fake-
checkin to run the tests to make sure things are good - but due to resource
constraints people are encouraged to reduce the coverage; heck, they have a
"high score board" to shame the heavy users.

