Mozilla brings back 64-bit builds of Firefox for Windows

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/mozilla.dev.apps.firefox/DOihL2429NM/discussion

by cpeterso • 14 years ago

50 49 14 years ago

groups.google.com

Great to see them listening to feedback there!

jlgreco• 14 years ago

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-• 14 years ago

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

http://www.2ality.com/2011/12/firefox-electrolysis-on-hold.h...

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.

marshray6• 14 years ago

New programming languages have been the downfall of many a great tech company, but not nearly as many as "focusing on your flagship product" to the exclusion of a changing world.

Rust, Typescript, Go, Dart are all awesome. I'd love to see any one of them change the world of development.

mcpherrinm2• 14 years ago

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.

cpeterso2• 14 years ago

Electrolysis also broke compatibility with many Firefox add-ons. The code is not dead, however. It's used in B2G.

AndrewDucker4• 14 years ago

Single process per tab is heavyweight, and is the reason why Chrome uses more memory than Firefox once you have a few tabs open.

Very few people actually hit the point where 64-bit memory is useful to them, and thus it's not a focus for Firefox at the moment.

wanderr• 14 years ago

It's been a while since I've used Firefox as my primary browser, but in my experience, long running use of Firefox used way more memory than Chrome. Because of its process per tab architecture, Chrome has always been able to clean up unused memory much better than Firefox. To me that's more important than saving memory on individual tabs, because I leave my browser open for weeks at a time.

mixmastamyk2• 14 years ago

It should be. x64 has speed improvements (due to quirks), and Win64 has important security improvements.

From the article:

> At this point, the Mozilla project does not have the resources to actively support this use case.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation#Financing

$300 million a year, and they can't afford to support Win64, the predominant platform, of an open source project? Someone needs to get in there and start cleaning house.

Surio• 14 years ago

> Single process per tab is heavyweight, and is the reason why Chrome uses more memory than Firefox once you have a few tabs open.

Very true. One has to experience it before it hits you. I've completely stopped using Chrome/Iron now.

azakai• 14 years ago

> It still sounds like their focus really is not on 64-bit

It's a matter of priorities. 64-bit is important, but for almost all users, it isn't an immediate concern to use 32-bit on windows, nor would they get a big benefit to move to 64-bit bit there.

There are other things that the devs are focused on, that have more tangible immediate benefits. That's all it comes down to. At some point though I would imagine 64-bit would become higher priority.

edit: Regarding multiprocess, it is already used in FirefoxOS, for example. Enabling it on desktop would be hard because of all the existing addons, on mobile though it has been used for a while (the Android browser was multiprocess, now it is multithreaded, and the FirefoxOS browser is as I said multiprocess). Since most of the growth in the browser market today is in mobile (sales of desktop PCs actually declined this year), that is a forward-looking approach I would say.

keeperofdakeys2• 14 years ago

From what I have read, it is lack of a maintainer since the current developers are concentrating on other features. The 64-bit support problem is also only on Windows, and one of the dis-incentives is lack a of 64-bit plugins.

marshray6• 14 years ago

Lack of plugins is a benefit in my world! :-)

Seriously, there are other tangible security benefits to 64 bits as well. For example, ASLR is going to have more bits with which to randomize DLL base addresses.

cpeterso2• 14 years ago

We're only talking about 64-bit builds of Firefox for Windows. Firefox builds for Mac OS X and Linux are already 64-bit. Chrome is 32-bit on both Windows and Mac OS X.

marshray6• 14 years ago

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!

sliverstorm3• 14 years ago

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.

kevingadd• 14 years ago

If you ask those users to change their browsing habits, they're more likely to change browsers. Sad but true :)

keeperofdakeys2• 14 years ago

As someone who often has more then a few tabs open, I use it primarily as a way of saving pages to read later (especially with HN links). I find I would never actually read bookmarks, but having tabs means I will get around to reading them. Mozilla did a presentation on this kind of use-case recently it recently, https://speakerdeck.com/bcg/saving-for-later.

derleth• 14 years ago

> It still seems to me like, if you have thousands of open tabs, it is your browsing habits that need to change- not Firefox.

"You're holding it wrong."

Decisions like these make software that's unusable for some people. It's the Apple Syndrome: You either obey the One Steve Jobs Way or you go elsewhere. Let's leave the Apple Syndrome to Apple, and make software everyone can use.

marshray6• 14 years ago

I believe that as developers, it's our role to give the users what they want and not judge them.

Except in cases where we really do know better and the user is likey just digging themselves deeper (e.g., creating security problems). Then they deserve a warning.

If you were WalMart manager and someone came in and a schoolteacher bought your entire inventory of crayons and wanted more, would you not order more for them? Or would you say "you need to change those kids' habits so they aren't breaking all those crayons".

mistercheese• 14 years ago

I would say that if lots of users are using tabs as placeholders in this way, and I personally know a lot including myself, then it's evidence of the bookmarking system being a bad or poorly designed solution for this problem. Bookmarks are treated as long term archives for links, and more trouble to manage, curate, and organize than is necessary for ephemeral sites you'd like to read later.

Some people mention "read it later" features, which I personally use. Safari has read lists, but I would argue these are also poorly understood and under utilized by most people.

For me, I believe a solution is something like "read it later", but lighter weight, easier to manage, and more integrated so that it doesn't just end up being another out of sight, forgotten backlog of things you wish you had read.

ANTSANTS• 14 years ago

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.

TillE• 14 years ago

It isn't "perfectly good" though, is it? As far as I'm concerned, bookmarking is an unsolved problem. Every system in existence sucks.

Pocket, Instapaper, etc. are nice enough for reading things later, but they don't handle the use case of bookmarks as a reference system. I'm not aware of anything which does that well.

nilved• 14 years ago

ADD is a noun, not an adjective.

marshray6• 14 years ago

Well now, aren't you being Mr. OCD today? No need to get all ICD-9 and DSM-V on me.

csense• 14 years ago

I always thought ADD was an assembly language instruction.

b3tta• 14 years ago

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.

kbuck• 14 years ago

Having it is easy (which is what they've decided to do in this compromise), it's supporting it that's hard.

mook• 14 years ago

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.

Mozilla brings back 64-bit builds of Firefox for Windows

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