Mozilla quietly kills Firefox 64-bit for Windows

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

by Reltair • 14 years ago

40 56 14 years ago

thenextweb.com

bifrost• 14 years ago

This just reeks of dumb. Seriously guys, support 64 bit platforms or perish.

shawn-butler• 14 years ago

Have you noticed any tangible benefit to using a 64-bit build over a 32-bit one? Performance of the current x64 builds as measured by responsiveness and javascript benchmarks is about on-par with the 32-bit version for most things; the performance and even compilation of plugins is however another matter entirely and the reason for using Firefox for me over another solution is almost always the plugins available.

I have been using PaleMoon builds and from what I gather the source tree is not being tombstoned, just the nightly builds. [0]

The reasons given for crashes (driver/component out-of-tree bugs) make sense but I'm not really involved in the development or testing so I'm sure others will have better input.

[0] http://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1700

Negitivefrags• 14 years ago

They do support 64 bit platforms. With 32 bit binaries.

If you have no need for more than 3gb of memory per process then 32 bit is a great choice. The pointers being half size is a non-trivial memory saving.

I'd be happy if windows would let you use something like the x32 build target that linux got recently for extra registers though.

josephlord• 14 years ago

There will be a memory saving but the loss of access to better instructions and the registers would surely cost you some performance overall (may be benchmark and processor dependent)

ZoFreX• 14 years ago

32-bit processes can get 4GB of memory on 64-bit Windows: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa36...

I thought the limit was 2GB, which Firefox is getting dangerously close to. 4GB gives a lot more wiggle room, but I wonder how long it will last...

keeperofdakeys4• 14 years ago

The problem is you need almost-contrived situations to notice these kinds of improvements, and a web browser deals with way too much I/O to fit into this category.

alexkus• 14 years ago

I'd rather not have to pollute a pure 64-bit install with a whole bunch of 32-bit libraries to run just one 32-bit app though. It's adds even more headache keeping those patched and up to date.

raverbashing3• 14 years ago

Let me just say something

"Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition released on April 25, 2005" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_Professional_x64_Edi...

7 years.

Go to a store, see what kind of Windows is being shipped, if it's 32 or 64bits.

If there's one version that has to be discontinued that version is the 32-bit version.

Linux as well suffers with lack of 64-bit versions, it seems Mozilla started shipping them the other day (and is not very promoted)

Computers already ship with more than 4GB memory.

Leave 32-bit, it's been enough time already.

easytiger• 14 years ago

> Linux as well suffers with lack of 64-bit versions,

Only in commercial or prop software

davidw2• 14 years ago

When you pay for memory on a monthly basis, economizing on it may be a good idea:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode

digeridoo• 14 years ago

Itanium is the future.

mburns• 14 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4817574

GvS• 14 years ago

I use Pale Moon 64-bit, custom-built and optimized Firefox clone: http://www.palemoon.org/

lnanek23• 14 years ago

Wow, just tried that and it is surprisingly fast. Wasn't expecting to notice a difference, but I did. Running on a Windows 8 x64, SSD drive, 1.7GHz i7.

e12e• 14 years ago

Hm, I use waterfox -- and it seems to be a little better updated?

http://www.waterfoxproject.org/

mylittlepony2• 14 years ago

...for Windows Operating Systems.

robin_reala• 14 years ago

Firefox is natively 64bit on Linux and OSX already.

lnanek23• 14 years ago

I used to use mainly Chrome and Firefox, but after moving to Windows 8 (I have to because I write some Windows 8 stuff) 64-bit, Firefox often hangs after opening, hangs after opening tabs, hangs after loading pages, etc.. I switched to using Safari as browser B, and I don't think that is even still official for Windows...

StavrosK2• 14 years ago

Why not Chrome?

lnanek23• 14 years ago

I do use Chrome. I need a second concurrent browser for various reasons.

JeremyMorgan2• 14 years ago

The big question is, why won't 64 bit catch on? Too new? I had a 64 bit chip 10 years ago and most of you probably did too. Too expensive?

It's a good question and it probably comes down to programmers and habit. Multi core processing and async/multithreading are finally starting to take hold but optimizing for a 64 bit bus still seems like an afterthought.

I am asking seriously because I don't have a definitive answer, but why is it just not catching on?

byuu2• 14 years ago

Never underestimate human apathy. A super majority of the world does not care for progress, if it means having to change even the most nominal of habits. Not even for sometimes massive benefits. In fact, a great many individuals will become extremely vocal if you try and force something as tiny as "picking one file extension for a file type instead of using two like we have in the past."

The only way things advance are when walls are finally hit. With 16-bit, this was trivial: the limitations were crippling. It'll get there with 32-bit, as applications begin to crash with the ~2GB per process memory limitations on Windows, and PCs continually appear with far more than 8GB of RAM available. But I'd say we are probably 5-10 years off from a point where we could consider deploying a 64-bit only application without losing users.

bad_user2• 14 years ago

I do not agree with your pessimistic argument regarding human nature.

A much bigger issue is that migrating a massive 32-bits application to 64-bits requires too much effort, because unfortunately the C and C++ specifications have left a ton of flexibility and room for platform-specific behavior.

For instance it's beyond me why those specs haven't mentioned details like concrete sizes for really basic datatypes, like Ints and Chars, especially since development in C and C++ tends to get into really low-level details and optimizations, which means you end up relying on Ints being 4 bytes in size (how could you not do that?). The truth really is that even seemingly unimportant details such as the size of Ints can mean the difference between a rock-solid 32-bits app and a 64-bits app that's broken almost beyond hope of ever being fixed.

If anything, this should be the number one reason for why we must stop using C and C++ for new application developments and even in systems/embedded programming we could do a lot better, as these languages are unsuitable for continued improvements due to Moore's law, impeding progress.

Can you see how this creates a vicious circle btw? So we can have affordable consumer workstations with more than 10 GB of RAM right now with multiple cores and all that, which makes client-side development in garbage-collected functional programming languages feasible, but we can't really go there because the 32-bits legacy is holding us back. That's funny and goes to show that sometimes Worse is Not Better.

gurkendoktor2• 14 years ago

What you say is often true. Take Windows XP vs Windows 7; Windows 7 is miles ahead in the security department, that should be a killer reason for people to upgrade. Or IPv4 vs IPV6 for obvious reasons.

But 64-bit has none of these big advantages in practice. Battery life on OS X was worse right after the switch.[1] I have downloaded Podcasts a year before iTunes ran in 64-bit mode and they stopped working with the switch (nothing obscure - early Railscasts episodes). Many perfectly fine machines have been marked obsolete by Apple because their processors or graphics drivers weren't 64bit. - Windows has been a mess for me too: the 64-bit ODBC control panel is in system32 and the 32-bit ODBC control panel is in WoW64.[2] Because there are no fat binaries, casual users suddenly need to know which version of a Windows program to download. - So there is a lot of friction that needs to be outweighed. For what? - If Firefox wants to escape the 2GB barrier, the wiser choice might be to use one process per tab, as other browsers do.

If you look at the first and last sentence of your posting, you are basically accusing people of apathy because they keep using their 32-bit computers.

[1] http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/104687/64-bit-safari-reduce... (might also be caused by API changes that Apple has tied to the 64-bit platform) [2] http://robertoschiabel.wordpress.com/2008/02/28/windows-x64-...

daeken• 14 years ago

> I had a 64 bit chip 10 years ago and most of you probably did too.

Intel didn't put out an x86-64 chip until 2004, and their first desktop chip wasn't until early 2005 (IIRC). AMD's first 64-bit chip (Opteron) wasn't until 2003. Neither of these were mass market for quite a few years; it wasn't until 2006 that you really started seeing them in mass-market desktops. Now, there were exceptions of course, most notably the iMac and PowerMac G5, but 64-bit machines really weren't in the hands of general users until 2006-2007.

rplnt• 14 years ago

Athlon64, released in 2003, was quite popular. In the middle of the 2004 most of the AMD desktop processors (athlon, sempron) were 64-bit. So it wasn't "quite a few years" exactly. Only netbooks brought 32bit back to life somehow.

JeremyMorgan2• 14 years ago

Now that I think about it, rplnt is right it was late 2003 I got an athlon64, so 9 years.

twoodfin• 14 years ago

This sounds like a chicken-and-egg problem somewhat specific to Mozilla. Their users depend on a large stable of independently developed plugins, which must be updated to support a 64-bit Windows browser. I can imagine that many of those plugin developers are much less motivated to do the requisite porting (or fix 64-bit bugs after they port) before Mozilla ships (or even commits to shipping) a 64-bit Windows browser. But when plugins used by 80%+ of your userbase are nonexistent or buggy, releasing a browser becomes difficult: Everyday users will assume it's buggy because they don't make the distinction between plugin authors and Mozilla.

atesti• 14 years ago

Why can't Firefox's plugincontainer marshall the calls between 32bit and 64bit?

CJefferson• 14 years ago

While having a 64-bit OS is useful, the majority of apps I work on never use anywhere near 4GB. Firefox has distributed 64-bit builds, so it is not the case that they aren't willing to put the work in. However, there turns out to be basically no advantage to running a 64-bit web browser.

gryph0n• 14 years ago

If you're a heavy browser user, or if you simply never close your browser, you'll frequently run into the scenario where 32 bit Firefox reaches the 2GB virtual memory limit, whereupon it gets killed. Yep, it's 2GB, atleast on 32bit OS (I'm on Win 7 32bit).

Just the convenience factor of not having to restart my browser frequently is enough to make me want to embrace x64. My blocker is that my corporate IT policy is to have 32 bit OS.

Chris_Newton• 14 years ago

The big question is, why won't 64 bit catch on?

I suppose the obvious response is “Why should it?”

It makes a lot of sense to have a 64-bit operating system if we have, for example, more than 4GB of memory to work with. However, unless a single process needs access to the same scale of resources all on its own, there isn’t necessarily any advantage to writing things like application code the same way.

Moreover, moving to 64-bit pointers means more memory is required for data structures and for assembly level instructions that use indirection. In both cases, there is the potential for a significant performance hit, for example if less information fits into a cache.

OK, what about using 64-bit instructions that let us calculate with larger values? Again, that might be useful in some contexts, but on PC processors we’ve had specialist instructions for things like double-precision floating point calculations or operating over multiple bundled values simultaneously for a long time, so there are only limited benefits to be had.

Of course, set against all of these ambiguous benefits is the fact that porting to 64-bit can take a lot of work if the original code, data structures, file formats and so on were not designed with portability in mind. And once you’ve ported, if you’re also running a 32-bit version, now you have more testing to do, any related software might have to speak two protocols/APIs to remain compatible with both, etc. (This seems to be one of the main underlying points in the cited article.)

Looking at the astronomical memory requirements for something like browsers opening multiple tabs these days, perhaps in the case of Firefox there really is an argument for supporting more than 4GB of RAM. On the other hand, even modern web pages full of large images and multimedia wizardry usually only come in at ~100kB or maybe ~1MB, so even with dozens of tabs open, you need to be doing an awful lot behind the scenes to be in any danger of hitting a 4GB limit. Presumably the Mozilla folks don’t expect this to be a problem.

beatgammit3• 14 years ago

What about WebGL? It's catching on, and that means that we could see huge memory usage in a small number of tabs. I'm thinking we'll see 3d games become popular relatively quickly.

Gamers tend to have tons of tabs in their browsers. Couple this with tons of game resources and we have a serious memory hog.

mtgx• 14 years ago

And here I was thinking they must be already working on the 64 bit for ARMv8 and Android for a 2014 release.

keeperofdakeys4• 14 years ago

This is talking specially about 64-bit on windows, related to windows-specific problems. Linux and osx have fully-functioning 64-bit versions, so this won't hinder ARM 64-bit.

PommeDeTerre• 14 years ago

Mozilla seems, at least to me, to be becoming more and more like the GNOME project. It's projecting a constant stream of unusual, if not outright bad, ideas and actions.

The Firefox version numbering debacle, including the constant problems it caused for extensions, was just plain silly.

Then there's Firefox Mobile. I've always found it very inferior to the other commonly-available mobile browsers. Aside from trying it out briefly, there was no reason to continue using it. This is probably the same for others, and likely why its uptake basically hasn't happened at all.

Earlier this year they seem to have withdrawn their interest in Thunderbird, which is by far one of their better offerings.

More recently, there's been a lot said about Firefox OS. There's a very good chance that this will become an unused, uninspiring, generally-ignored product, much like Firefox Mobile.

And now there's this decision.

Redirecting effort away from applications that are actually used, like Firefox and Thunderbird, toward things that clearly have little to no future, like Firefox Mobile or Firefox OS, just doesn't make sense.

nanook• 14 years ago

> things that clearly have little to no future, like Firefox Mobile or Firefox OS, just doesn't make sense.

Firefox OS has to be the most exciting thing they're doing. Why does it not have a future?

trendnet• 14 years ago

Because a lot of people don't give a bear about Firefox OS.

sabret00the2• 14 years ago

I think when you make such a damning post as this, you're required to make sure all opinions are current and factual. I mostly talk about what seems to be a clearly outdated opinion of Firefox for Android (Mobile) which is widely regarded as one of the best mobile browsing experiences around. Though each to their own.

The Firefox versioning change was naive. It was rushed and a lot of work that should've taken place prior to the change was done afterwards and it remains to be seen just whether or not they'll ever truly pick up all the pieces from that. The negative word of mouth about extensions breaking is out there.

There is no excuse for the demise of Thunderbird. It remains to be a short sighted decision. But in that regard, Mozilla never really had the same ambitions as Opera. Mozilla should've been approaching the likes of HTC and Samsung and offering to provide the browser and mail experience rather than Google.

As for Firefox OS/B2G, I'd say it's highly probable that it'll fall by the wayside. Despite the resources thrown behind it. It's just not going to be a viable competitor. When you think about the sheer amount of money and effort thrown behind the likes of Android, iOS and Windows Phone, what exactly are Mozilla hoping for? It's only served to slow down development of features and other products that could serve the greater Mozilla community.

simonster• 14 years ago

There was never a 64-bit version of Firefox. There were 64-bit Nightly builds, which aren't even branded as Firefox. Running them because you wanted a 64-bit version of Firefox would have been a silly thing to do, because, as unreleased software, they also crash significantly more frequently than released Firefox versions, which almost certainly would have killed any productivity increase from running a 64-bit version of Firefox.

Mozilla quietly kills Firefox 64-bit for Windows

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