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Firefox Is Going 64-Bit: What You Need To Know
An anonymous reader writes "Firefox product manager Asa Dotzler determined that figuring out the 64-bit confusion surrounding Firefox it will be 'near the top' of his to-do list this summer and fall. One could conclude that Mozilla has no idea at this point what people are expecting from a 64-bit version of Firefox, so Dotzler is asking for some feedback. More speed? More security? What about plug-in availability? All of the above, please."
64-bit is important because an increasing number of operating systems are no longer shipping 32-bit libraries by default, and on the ones that are, most apps are 64-bit so they may not be swapped in. On this machine, only four of the apps that I'm running are 32-bit - and two of those are just because I'm running really old versions and haven't bothered to upgrade (they're open source and 32-bit clean). With these running, I have a lot of libraries loaded twice, once for them and once for every other application. A couple of years ago, the balance was in the other direction - a few 64-bit apps and a lot of 32-bit ones. If FireFox is the only 32-bit app that you're running, then that's a huge amount of 32-bit shared library code that is loaded solely for FireFox's benefit.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
(Easy) compatibility with 64-bit plugins and not having to drag along a whole bloody system's worth of 32-bit libraries just to install the browser seem like the most evident reasons...
What confuses me is why they would be framing an address-length change in terms of additional features. With the specific exception of applications where the implementation of certain features requires easy access to gigantic slabs of memory, there isn't a whole lot of connection between 64-bitness and the feature list.
This sounds like like the, "Why should we rewrite our perfectly good 16 bit applications just because everybody else is jumping on the 32 bit bandwagon" conversations that we went through back in ancient times.
You're wasting your keyboard away. You'll never get them all and even if you do, they won't listen, understand, or care. Many, including myself, have been telling people for years that it's not just about the bigger address space. The all knowing Internet has decided we don't need a 64-bit address space and consequently all other features that come with a 64-bit processor are irrelevant.
Also, rest assured that even if Firefox became the most memory efficient browser in existence it would not matter. Once the Internet makes up its mind, you cannot change it by bringing up stupid things like facts.
Take your extra registers, SSE, shared libraries, processor tuning and shove it. The Internet has spoken.
Note to moderators: There is no +1 sarcastic, so you have no choice but to mod this insightful. No? Ok just mod parent up.