Firefox 8 for Windows x64: Has 64-bit browsing finally come of age?

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/90546-firefox-8-x64-has-64-bit-browsing-finally-come-of-age

by thomas • 15 years ago

31 33 15 years ago

kenjackson2• 15 years ago

I'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• 15 years ago

Yeah, 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• 15 years ago

x86-64 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• 15 years ago

I 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/ refers to 64-bit NaN boxing and links to the article I was thinking of, but unfortunately that seems to be broken.

danwolff2• 15 years 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

NanoWar• 15 years ago

How come I use Firefox 3.6 and there is already a version 8? Man, things go fast...

trafficlight• 15 years ago

Where have you been? The Firefox version scheme changes have been talked about almost every day here for the last few months.

mixmastamyk4• 15 years ago

Doesn't seem to feel right. They could have gone with 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, etc, and expectations would be better managed.

kijinbear• 15 years ago

Just 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.

technomancy• 15 years ago

Hopefully they switch to Roman numerals soon.

Then maybe a few decades down the line they'll reboot the series and go back to just "Firefox" like they did with the Star Trek films.

sciurus2• 15 years ago

You need to update to Firefox 5, the latest stable version. There are no security updates for Firefox 3.6.

yuhong• 15 years ago

There are no security updates for Firefox 3.6.

There is already and it will continue for a while.

01Michael102• 15 years ago

Why would anyone use a year and a half old browser? Firefox, Chrome, and Opera all have free updated versions of their fine browsers.

colonelxc• 15 years ago

Not everyone lives on the bleeding edge. For instance, my laptop runs Ubuntu 10.10, which still uses 3.6 by default. Even though it is pretty trivial to add the Mozilla PPA, I don't feel that the new features of 4 or 5 are important enough to switch to them before I upgrade my OS.

hristov• 15 years ago

Linux users have been using 64 bit Firefox for years now.

beej71• 15 years ago

64-bit Chrome, as well, for that matter.

ben_straub• 15 years ago

The 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• 15 years ago

Don't forget that 64-bit has more registers. That can be significant for performance.

mixmastamyk4• 15 years ago

Yes on x86, it is not generally the case.

antimora• 15 years ago

great, now all my 8GB of ram will be eaten up.

01Michael102• 15 years ago

I 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• 15 years ago

1) 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-hu2• 15 years ago

Firefox 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• 15 years ago

As long as you don't run debian/amd64 and consider a decent flash binary from adobe a requirement.

Firefox 8 for Windows x64: Has 64-bit browsing finally come of age?

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