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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."
Then why make a 64 bit version at all? If the company has no idea what people expect, then they don't need to be messing with it in first place.
Perhaps if they instead focused on fixing the memory leaks, pushing out 64-bit builds wouldn't be so pressing an issue?
Then why make a 64 bit version at all? If the company has no idea what people expect, then they don't need to be messing with it in first place.
Hurray! With 64 bits, Firefox might be able to address all the memory it uses...
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
This loony quack is getting quite annoying. For the record, chiropractors are fraudsters, voodoo witch doctors in suits who take in the gullible. This particular bird has that extra pathetic aspect in that he seems to actually believe the bullcrap he spins to others.
You're a fraud pal, a vile repugnant fraud.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
64-bit Firefox: Now with 192 gigabytes of memory leaks!
I thought I had been running a 64bit Firefox for years. So I wasn't? Or is this about finally doing a 64-bit Windows build? Probably since Moz Corp is entirely focused on Windows and treats Linux as a red headed stepchild.
Democrat delenda est
The OS X version is 64 bit already. At least, I can choose whether to launch it in 32- or 64-bit mode.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It ain't bordering on slander, it's reporting the reality that you're a fraudsters, along with all the other vile fraudsters in your "profession".
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Why does a browser need to be able to access more than 4GB ? Has anyone hit that limit yet ? Or even close ?
I want the one with the bigger GB's.....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
What's the problem with 64 bits? Firefox worked just fine with it for years. Unless you're using a doorstop machine or a doorstop OS, even having 32 bit libraries is a waste of disk space. Heck, even phones start having 2GB ram, suggesting ARM will need to transition soon. MIPS (Longsoon) is already there.
When project electrolysis finally lands on Firefox trunk, the only current benefit of 64 bits will be gone, but that's still not a reason to have a complete set of 32 bit libraries in memory (or even on disk).
Limits of 32 bits are annoying. For example, gcc-4.6 can partition flto compilation but it still needs to load everything into the memory. It'd be a huge waste of programming time to implement your own swapping if the OS is perfectly capable of doing that. If the address space is big enough, that is. You currently cannot compile Firefox with flto on a 32 bit machine at all, and it gives a huge (~20%) boost on typical C++ code.
Thus, your precious 32 bit systems are a doorstop architecture that would be nice to get rid of.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I'm actually a little bit torn. I have a friend who is a chiropractor, and he honestly believes in his trade. And I think most of them do... I mean, why would you go through all that training and certification if you thought it was quackery?
And they do see results. Why? Because the placebo effect is real. Sure, a chiropractor probably isn't actually accomplishing anything, but if the patient thinks they are, they might see their pain symptoms go away.
So, yeah, they can't claim to be doing anything that has been proven science behind it, but on the other hand they are improving people's lives.
Now, pain is one thing... cancer is another. Anyone claiming that rubbing and cracking will cure cancer belongs in jail.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
...back when I actually gave a damn. More specifically, when I ran Windows, which was a hell of a long time ago now (in computing terms)... back before mid to late 2006. Now, I run Linux, so Firefox, or Iceweasel, or whatever spinoff is included in the distribution due to the Mozilla Corporation's bitching is often included as 64-bit by default--as long as it's a 64-bit distro.
To top it off, with all of the bullshit Mozilla has been pulling off for quite a while now (starting not long after the formation of the corporation and their increasing grasp and restrictions on the use of their products), I've been considering switching. There are a bunch of extensions that IMO are must-haves, and they make the switch more difficult, but every release, every news story of Mozilla/Firefox is making me consider jumping ship before this titanic sinks. They already seem to be so disillusioned from everything they already stood for, it's rare for them to impress me any more.
What the hell has become of the Mozilla of the Firefox 1.0 to 2.0 era? They've really jumped off the deep end. First they started wanting more control and placing more restrictions on the distribution and use of the software, then they started chasing Chrome in every way possible. And more recently, they switch to a clusterfuck of a release/versioning system, forcibly breaking extensions every couple months.
Ditching this Asa dipshit (never did like the guy) and scrapping the whole "Mozilla Corporation" idea would be a great first start. Oh, and listening to the users, instead of blatantly copying the competition's (specifically Google's) every last move... most of which of which are just bad ideas in the first place, at least in the context of Firefox. If I want Chrome, I'll use it; make Firefox actually be Firefox. Us Firefox users want Firefox, not some fucking Frankenchromeopera; if we did, we would have escaped from your increasingly controlling grasp long ago.
I forced myself into some of the changes in 3.x eventually, but with all the needless shitty changes in 4/5 and the new rapid major version releases, it looks like I've reaching the end of my use (and recommendation to others) of their products.
I've not seen my browser use more than about 800MB of memory (and that seems quite ludicrous), but there are several reasons to want a 64-bit version:
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
> Why does a browser need to be able to access more than 4GB ?
Because I may want Linux running on a PC emulator written in JavaScript. Or I may want the latest Flash based animated jumping blinking dancing flickering seizure inducing graphics which make the web so much more informative.
But seriously, the real reason of global importance is so that you can have a much larger Farmville.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Firefox 64bit - now capable of completely glooping 2 exbibytes! At current rate of leaking, this means you now only need to restart one a day! (Warning, depending on speed of swap device, Firefox 64bit may take more than a day to restart.)
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
Dam, so Jesus was a Chiropractor? someone should tell the pope.
Releasing a 64-bit install is about compatibility in the environment. But an implication by the parent is that Mozilla can't work on increasing compatibility and fix bugs at the same time. These two things aren't related at all where we should welcome things like this.
Or another way to think about it: We should applaud Mozilla for releasing the 64-bit installer and continue to complain about the bugs.
A 64 bit version number and support for IPV8
They need 64-bits because the version number won't fit into a 32-bit unsigned integer.
This entire article makes no sense.
We simply want a version of Firefox that takes advantage of the additional resources our 64-bit machines have.
Sure there are probably specific optimizations you can do, but really the most important thing is simply to compile it to a 64-bit program instead of the x86 they use currently.
Can someone explain to me why anyone would think differently?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Webkit is a fine engine. Too bad no one is interested in using it to make a good browser.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
Didn't ya know that a carpenter is really a chiropractor? They just cure subluxations in trees!!
Funny note: Firefox says subluxations isn't spelled properly. So it must be made up.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
Please don't add native PDF support. Feeping creaturitis is never the answer.
A rolling stone is worth two in the bush!
PDF in the browser is a sin.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
Here's an idea. How about not breaking add-ons with every new version? That would be great!
I'm in the Firefox beta program, so they FORCE me to upgrade over and over and over again (really obnoxiously). And every single time, Firebug and Greasemonkey stop working. Problem is, I need Firebug, in particular, to do my job, so it's inconsiderate at the very least, a horrible way to treat your beta testers. And yet, much of my coding is in preparation for HTML5, so I need to use what's in the beta too.
So that's my suggestion for 64-bit. Use some of the extra address space to track add-ons better and not refuse to load them just because they haven't yet been certified to work in your tiny little frickin' point release.
Thanks a bunch!
At this time, Mozilla seems like a baby screaming for attention. They seem to be scrambling to match Chrome. I had been a Firefox user for ages. I didn't try Chrome because I don't like that Google runs background process to update Chrome. So I decided to go with Chromium (which does not have auto update feature but gets updated via Ubuntu repository). I found, once you go Chromium you never go back. Chromium is blazingly fast and stable. Even Firefox 5 is no match for it. Chromium uses way more memory than Firefox, but guess what? It doesn't have memory leaks. Firefox uses less memory but keeps leaking it. Fix memory leaks and stability issues in the current version (call it Firefox 100 for all I care). 64 bit version would be nice but not at the cost of basic problems that need fixing.
And a security risk. But hey...who care's about security. We want feature creep!
Om, nomnomnom...
My feeling is that the chiropractic business model is to provide some relief for awhile and when the problem returns, one will go back to get this relief, over and over again. Many years ago when I was living in Utah, chiropractors were claiming all kinds of cures for about anything, including cancer. If I remember correctly, the state removed their licenses and stopped issuing new ones. Chiropractic was basically shut down. I don't know if it as come back, but I assume if all the quacks were flushed out of the system, it may be back.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Maybe this will FINALLY mean no more nspluginwrapper crap;
Every time I try to open more than one PDF (Ubuntu 8.04 LTS / 10.04 LTS) nspluginwrapper goes nuts, no more PDF rendering....
Firefox has been available as 64 Bit for years. The article is about 64-bit WINDOWS.
Anyone with average computing requirements, more than half a brain, and 4GB or less of RAM.
Why would you want to launch a whole 'nother application, especially on a platform where PDF is built-in to the OS and can be displayed much faster than launching bloatware like Adobe Reader. Maybe you like Reader or want to disable PDF altogether for security, but I agree it would be nice to have an inline option, this a major reason I use Safari (browse research papers online, with *drumroll* the browser!)
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.
Hasn't a linux 64 bit version been available for a few years now?
He's a troll. Probably not one with an agenda, beyond provoking nerd rage. Consider:
1. He posts alt-med stuff on slashdot, a "news for nerds" site. There are only a few things more likely to provoke a flamewar than peddling quackery to rationalists. Perhaps he felt creationism or microsoft trolls would be too obvious?
2. He only ever posts about the one issue. He'll shoehorn chiropractic crap into any discussion. Including a story about a new version of an old browser. This is not the behaviour of a regular poster; even the genuine alt-med believers and conspiracy theorists post about other topics.
3. He hasn't quit, despite negative karma. Every post he makes spawns flamewars. A genuine idiot would feel unwelcome, give up and leave. A troll on the other hand, revels in the flamewars.
So, he's a troll. One here purely to start trouble. He's probably laughing at every idiot who feeds him by screaming "QUACK!"
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
I'm with you on all points, though I will say that FF4 introduced a really nice feature that saves time for me every day. That is, being able to type non-URL queries into the URL field to search FF's history database has really made my browsing more efficient. But that doesn't make up for the fact that FF4 & 5 are as leaky as the Titanic.
I take exception to your post. I know plenty of people in the medical profession. Most of them are good, honest people, who have never once mislead me on any count. They're not taking backhanders from Big Pharma.
My father is currently a practising psychiatrist, who is also doing a significant amount of research into his favourite psychiatric technique, which revolves around a one-on-one therapy to treat the roots of the problems (typically traumatic experiences). It involves little to no drugs, because it doesn't treat problems merely as a chemical imbalance.
I also take exception because I know people practising alternative medicine, and not one of them is as moronic as your post makes you sound.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Thanks Cwix (someone mark him informative), that explains it and displays my clear lack of knowledge on the subject, though I still think the pope should be told as they made this whole religion thing it might matter that they get some of the facts right.
~ $ which firefox
~ $ file
they truly needed that, because soon enough they'll run out of 32 bit integers they use for version numbering.
You can't handle the truth.
I have nothing against making it a 64 bit binary in general, but there really is absolutely no advantage to doing so. If your browser is eating more than 3 gigs of memory, your browser is broken, you should fix that problem first, not make it so it can eat more memory.
You're probably overlooking one of the major reasons why 64-bit binaries are beneficial (at least on the x86-64 architecture): more registers! More registers means less accessing main memory or cache just for local variables, which means faster code.
A 64-bit Firefox is also preferable if the rest of the system is already 64-bit because the need to load a whole bunch of 32-bit shared libraries which are only used by one program will be eliminated, meaning less wasted memory which may lead to better cache utilization. I'm not sure how congruous this last point is because I'm not familiar with how Firefox is built on the relevant platforms.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
/Madge
I'm running the 64-bit nightly right now. Everything seems to be working EXCEPT for the WMP integration. That's been the only downside I've been seeing.
Bryan
and justifiably so...Linux is still considered the cheapskate OS.
Development of FF for Linux takes resources. There are only 3,000 Linux Firefox users out there when, every year, FF Windows browser crashes affect over 40,000 people. They should drop Linux support and instead focus their development on the Windows version, a lot more people would be saved!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Chiropractic has done all of this and more. Don't just take my word for it, ask ANY Chiropractor and they will tell you the same thing. Look at Chiro videos on YouTube, they have lots of Thumbs Up from other Chiros.
Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a brand new research technique!! Forget about all that time-wasting and expensive business of double-blinded randomized trials, and the complex process of producing 'evidence', lets just put videos of untested treatments on Youtube and see how many thumbs up votes they get. We could combine this revolutionary technique with that other ideal indicator of treatment performance called 'Just asking people'. Why we've bothered with complex trials for all these years is a true mystery.
Brilliant!
There is nothing interesting going on at my blog
Pale Moon is already available for people to check out. It's Windows-only, but I've been running it for a while as a secondary browser at work, and it works pretty well, albeit with a few minor quirks.
And you think Firefox is an example of a "good browser"?
If FF4 and beyond is your standard, well... I think you might need to reevaluate. I dropped FF for Chrome as my alternate browser and have not regretted it for a second.
$ file /usr/lib/firefox-5.0/firefox-bin /usr/lib/firefox-5.0/firefox-bin: ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.15, stripped
Say what?
Chiropractors are fine for dealing with back pain, shitty posture and associated issues, what's bullshit are those who claim to be able to fix all kinds of unrelated ailments via chiropracty or those who claim that everything you do every day causes harm to your body that can only be fixed by chiropracty, such as the GP.
Fix the damn UI Hanging issues, get ASLR fully working along with DEP and full process isolation before adding stupid features and Don't forget multithread support working correctly.
I'd much rather they fix these issues while moving towards 64bits as these alone should improve the damn stability and security. Hell if a damn Add-On hangs or creates problems, I'd love to be able to kill the thread/process that's hung instead of shuting down the entire app.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
It doesn't. Why does a browser need to stay in 32-bit compatibility mode? We've had 64-bit desktop processors for eight years now, and 64-bit desktop operating systems for just as long. The only reason Firefox has waited so long to distribute a 64-bit binary is because garbage like Adobe Flash only works in 32-bit. If you were writing a tiny little terminal application that only required a few KB of memory, would you only compile it in 16-bit mode?
I run both 5.0 and 8.0a1 and only the last one has the occasional crash but then makes up by being faster.
And I use them in both 32 and 64bit Linux.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Look at Chiro videos on YouTube, they have lots of Thumbs Up from other Chiros.
Ok, there's no way this can be anything other than a troll. I just can't tell who exactly he's trolling. Whoever it is, he's good.
Everything will be taken away from you.
I have a 64bit Pentium running 64bit Win 7 pro, but the FF install is the 32bit version. The Flash player crashes fairly often, on Flash content which didn't crash it before on an all 32bit machine. Is it the 32/64 bit difference? Will a 64 bit Firefox solve this problem?
--
make install -not war
All those posts, and only one person who gives any indication they know what they're talking about.
Kudos.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
For the record, chiropractors are fraudsters, voodoo witch doctors in suits who take in the gullible.
Now wait a minute, I know what you're getting at but I have one question: If someone throws out their back or hip or shoulder or something and goes to a chiro, and the guy who is trained in bones and muscles and stuff can put it back in place so the person is NOT in excruciating pain any more, how is THAT fraud?
Chiropractic CAN and DOES get more credit than it is due, there are quacks and scams for sure, but chiros in general can and do help people in certain circumstances. It isn't all crap.
I have seen it both ways, it isn't fair to the legit ones to say they are all frauds and quacks.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
... There are only 3,000 Linux Firefox users out there ...
I find this hard to believe. Firefox is installed by default on many of the most popular Linux distributions (such as Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.). When you consider the millions of Linux users using these distros (yes, I can back that up with reliable sources - can you say the same?), it's not hard to imagine that the number of Firefox users on Linux extends well over a million (maybe millions).
Bear in mind that Firefox is usually installed via a package manager, so the number of Linux downloads (if any) from the Firefox website are not to be relied upon as a true indication of the amount of Linux users using Firefox. In addition, there are also many of us who prefer to compile from source, as we are then free to modify and tinker, or just study out of academic curiosity.
Besides, although I'm not familiar with the Firefox codebase, I'm pretty sure that there is no "Windows version", and it's just recompiled for each operating system. Development "of FF for Linux" is, I think, not an issue.
Just my 2c.
>And you think Firefox is an example of a "good browser"?
It's alright I guess. Mozilla is far better, especially as FF get more like chrome.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
Do you have like a circle of friends, some of them being astrologists, some phrenologists, some diluting donkey piss to 1 part per billion, selling it as holistic medicine and most being religious freaks, scientologists maybe?
When you turn on a computer, do you think it's magic marshmallows that carry the signal across the interwebs?
Because if that's how you roll, I really am wondering how you are still around to tell us all about the wonders of chiropractice.
You can't handle the truth.
Does Evince even support Javascript? Of course there could be attacks on the engine itself, but why target Cairo when you could target GDI or something. Plus that's just harder than attacking via JS.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
If you don't reply you are letting their BS stand where innocent people might believe it and be harmed by it. If you do reply then you are giving them a reaction they want.
The way to deal with posters like this on a forum is to either delete them or lock them with an explanation from a mod that they are bullshit and if the poster is persistent attempt to apply a ban (though bans are generally difficult to enforce on the internet). However /. for whatever reason doesn't do that, posts can be modded up and down by users with mod points but that is a far cry from what mods on most forums can do.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
You forgot doubling the amount of registers and a sane ABI (register passing for arguments, also for float values) and a sane floating-point implementation due to SSE always being available.
Also, PC-relative addressing reducing the overhead for position-independent code.
Getting a few % extra performance is easy, more for special workloads or if the compiler is bad (and most compilers are quite bad) since 64-bit code generation is easier due to above. This might also mean improved speed for anything that uses JIT, both for the compilation and the generated code.
Also security improvements e.g. on Windows because 64-bit code is forced to be compatible to DEP and ASLR (and improved effectiveness for ASLR due to larger address space). Important for browsers, in particular since it means that plugins can't break security by loading code marked as not compatible with these.
Well, that's exactly how things should be dealt with on the Internet. People post rubbish, other people counter it.
I read Slashdot at -1 because I don't really want all the idiotic comments to be censored. I would rather make up my own mind, and see other people's opinions. I like the way Slashdot does this (a rating system that people can use on their own to filter with) instead of having a bunch of small minded nannying moderators going 'round deleting people's posts to protect us from nasty words that we don't agree with.
Excuse me, what does this have to do with a web browser being able to take advantage of newer OS and Processor capabilities?
SpiderMonkey uses 64-bit value types on all architectures (x86, x86-64, ARM, etc), storing either a 64-bit float or a 32-bit int or a pointer (31 bits on 32-bit, 47 bits on 64-bit), so it shouldn't make any difference to their memory usage. (The non-float values get packed into the range of unused NaN float representations, to avoid ambiguity). I think other modern JS engines do pretty much the same thing. JS semantics are that numbers are 64-bit floats, so implementations couldn't really use 63-bit ints (too precise) or 32-bit floats (too imprecise) anyway, though 32-bit ints are a safe optimisation.
I wish I had mod points
Expecting: Launch faster, operate faster. I don't expect much difference in security from 32 to 64 bit. Also, I would hope that most plugins are compatible
And stop adding crap like pdf readers - you wanna display something you use external apps.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
There's some braindead copy protection software using USB "security" dongles that unfortunately is required before you can run some very expensive applications that are used in some engineering and geophysical workplaces. One variety of that is 16 bit only and the idiots even wrote 16 bit MSDOS USB drivers to make it work instead of dragging it into the 1990s with 32 bit support. That keeps some stuff that could actually use a bit more memory firmly on WinXP 32bit unless it's a pirated version (and apparently the workaround is very trivial). In practice a lot of that "security" software only punishes the innocent.
It's about having to have two versions of a lot of shared libraries filling up memory. That's typically only a big deal if you have only one or two applications left that need the 32 bit libraries or if you are running things that use a heap of memory.
I roll my own Windows builds of Firefox and have been using Win64 versions since before FF4 actually came out; the difference is really minimal; I use 64-bit Flash (square) and Java, everything works and it's native. Currently there is a patch in the works to enable Firefox x64 to use 32bit plugins via the wrapper, which I get the feeling will probably encourage Adobe to not bother releasing a "proper" x64 Flash.
Cuz 32-bit version runs out of memory when you have it open for several days and 100's of windows/tabs?
Cuz, the 32-bit version doesn't work well on 64-bits because it isn't aligned right and suffers terrible performance penalties?
(during a bogdown today, where it had it's cpu 'peg'ed...(why the windows threading model doesn't support multiple cpu's is ... well, linux really lucked out in choosing their 1thread/proc model)
Here's the stack trace:
0) ntoskrnl.exe!memset+0x64b
1) ntoskrnl.exe!KeWaitForMultipleObjects+0xd52
2) ntoskrnl.exe!KeWaitForSingleObject+0x19f
3) ntoskrnl.exe!__misaligned_access+0xba4
4) ntoskrnl.exe!__misaligned_access+0x1821
5) ntoskrnl.exe!__misaligned_access+0x1a97
6) js3250.dll!JS_IsAboutToBeFinalized+0x38
7) xul.dll!??_7gfxPDFSurface@@6B@+0x34600
8) xul.dll!?sDPI@gfxPlatform@@1HA+0x1d0
9) xul.dll!NS_LogInit_P+0x388d
10) nspr4.dll!PR_AssertCurrentThreadOwnsLock+0x12
11) js3250.dll!JS_IsAboutToBeFinalized+0x38
12) js3250.dll!JS_DHashTableEnumerate+0x6c
13) xul.dll!?TimerCallback@?$nsExpirationTracker@\
VgfxFont@@$02@@CAXPAVnsITimer@@PAX@Z+0x239f
14) xul.dll!?GetUnderlineOffset@gfxWindowsFontGroup@\
@UAENXZ+0xcbfe
15) xul.dll!NS_LogInit_P+0x388d
16) js3250.dll!JS_SetPrototype+0x29c
17) xul.dll!?SetLineBreaks@gfxTextRun@@UAEHIIHHPANPA\
VgfxContext@@@Z+0x1b6
(It never recovered from it's peg -- finally just crashed, but notice that out of the above 17 calls, 3 are for misaligned access's handed by exception handlers (x86 machines still get misaligned access exceptions when you access words that aren't hw aligned, they are just normally handled 'automatically' by all x86 OS's that then patch the pieces together -- at the expense of entering a system exception handler that has to glue things back together.
So Maybe it's because of issue's like the above, but compiling for 64-bit usually gives a ~15% performance boost over 32 bit code, and in the above trace 17% of the call stack nest is due to misaligned code/data.
Anyway, the baloney that they don't know what to expect is just that -- it's them spewing garbage for being way late in getting a Win64 version out -- as they've had a 64-bit linux version (coexisting with a 32-bit version for at least a few years -- and they also have had 64-bit on MacOS....so it wouldn't be "doing" something different, it would be bringing the windows platform up to parity with the linux and Mac platforms.
All the time I encounter things where programmers cling to past ways of doing things because they can't be bothered to learn something new, to rewrite their code and so on.
A big one I remember was with Windows 2000 (and then XP) and the WDM device model for soundcards. NT had some pretty bad soundcard support. I mean it played audio and everything, but was a problem both in terms of what it could present to apps and in terms of limits on drivers. Well WDM fixed that. Wonderful new system, fixed a ton of issues. However the pro soundcard I had refused to support it. They said it couldn't do what pro apps needed. Nonsense, that it could do those things was right in the docs. Then when they finally got one out it had massive problems, not the least of which being it only supported 2 of 8 channels, again they claimed that was a limit built in to WDM.
They finally got on board, after like a year and a half, but it took forever and probably many people like me bitching.
64-bit is even harder since Windows does 32-bit compatibility so flawlessly. Users can't even tell if apps are 32-bit or 64-bit without specifically looking for it, there isn't a speed penalty (that you can notice) or different interface or anything. Ring 3 32-bit apps work just like they always did (Ring 0 stuff has to all be 64-bit).
So devs are lazy. They release only 32-bit versions since you still need to support that, there are plenty of non 64-bit system, and since "There's no reason to have 64-bit.
Annoys me to no end since the reason is simply to run natively on the new system. No, you don't need a 64-bit browser but why not have one? Why shouldn't everything move to the new architecture?
It also annoys me because people find this shit bites them in the ass eventually. One way we saw this happen was 32-bit apps with 16-bit installers when 64-bit Windows came out. Companies kept using the old installer since "It worked," and "There's no reason to change." However then along comes 64-bit Windows, which cannot run 16-bit apps since you can't switch to Virtual 8086 Mode when running in Long Mode. So now their shit can't install, even though it would actually run in the new Windows.
Programmers really need to get less lazy about supporting new technologies. Part of working in a tech field is being willing to keep up to date on a quickly moving landscape. Things change all the time, you need to change with them. I see that from the IT end all the time. A great example is virtualization. Just 10 years ago it was a new term, emulation was really what I'd heard of, and something that was mostly a toy. I played with emulators for old game systems. I'd never consider virtualizing a PC to do work on, way too slow, much less a server. Now we have almost everything virtual, not just to save money, but to take advantage of new features it offers, like say snapshoting a computer. I can't very well say "We didn't do it this way in the past so we aren't going to change." When new technology comes out, we look at it, consider if it will help us do what we do better, is it worth the cost, and learn about it.
I get tired of programmers that have to be drug in to a new way of doing things kicking and screaming. 64-bit is here, now, and it is the future. It is not new, it has been around for quite some time. Support it. All apps should have a 64-bit version, yes even if you don't need the memory. It isn't hard, and things run more efficient natively in Long Mode than in Compatibility Mode. Get with the program.
You have to go to a sports chiropractor, they treat the body like a machine. They fix the problem and send you on your way. Went to a local chiro in Lakeport, CA and told him what the problem was, he didn't even address it! Wasted my money and my time, what a fuckhead.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That's bordering on slander.
Chiropractic has saved countless millions of lives without drugs and surgery. On the contrary, it's the Big Pharma controlled Medical system that are the frauds.
- Has an MD ever cured a subluxation? No.
Why would they cure a subluxion? The General Chiropractic Council, the UK's chiropractic regulatory agency run by chiropractors, states that subluxions have nothing to do with disease:
"The chiropractic vertebral subluxation complex is an historical concept but it remains a theoretical model. It is not supported by any clinical research evidence that would allow claims to be made that it is the cause of disease."
By law, in the UK you cannot make any of the claims you have posted above.
Forget about slander, lets talk about libel, legal liability and false advertising.
nt.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
You get faster code if your code is under a lot of register pressure because you're doing computations with a bunch of reusable intermediate results, etc.
You get slower code if your code is memory-bound, especially if pointer-chasing is involved (because you blow out your caches more easily and end up having to actually talk to RAM more).
Which one matters more for a web browser is a tough question. For example, most operations on the DOM are of the pointer-chasing variety.
See also https://twitter.com/#!/bz_moz/status/73784940755566592
Your second point doesn't make that much sense....
32-bit Firefox already uses 64-bit values (basically a union of a double and an unsigned long long) to store its JS values. Going to 64-bit actually makes this _harder_ because your pointers might not be distinguishable from a double. That's dealt with on x86-64 by exploiting the fact that it's really a 47-bit address space, but that causes some additional complexity and masking slowdown, so the JS folks have been considering moving to 128-bit values when running on x86-64. This would incidentally also work on 64-bit architectures with a 64-bit address space (e.g. sparc64).
Well, I had some pinched nerves. He had me hold my arms out and try to hold them level while he pushed on them. One arm was definitely weaker. To prove his point he handed me a weight and had me compare. Once brought to my attention, I could definitely feel a "lopsidedness" in my arm strength. You might think this was normal, but after tweaking my neck and upper shoulder area, the gap between greatly closed and it became easier to lift in both.
Similarly, pressure points on my ankles (that I could self apply) also made me realize I was much less pain sensitive in one leg. Adjustments in my lumbar area and suddenly I could feel the pressure point (again, more in both, but also much closer to being equal). My skin was also a bit more sensitive overall on my legs/feet and I "felt" stronger (eg walking about I felt lighter, so my muscles must have been responding better?)
I'm sure some spout a lot of garbage... but you can't argue with something like that.
Stop and think as well. Your CNS is distributed from your spine. Nerve signal propagation -is- impaired when pressure or other disturbances are inflicted upon them. It makes perfect sense that such disturbances on the branches coming out from between vertebrae could have negative effects. Now, how 'strongly' such effects could be without some sort of obvious problem or trauma (bone spur, crushed disk etc) I couldn't say - but I could see some 'systemic' symptoms to occur or other conditions exaggerate because of this.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
It's late, I'm tired, and you're already downmodded so why not feed the troll?
1. MD is pretty broad. I'm sure it's happened. I'm also pretty sure that any kind of spinal trauma resulting in pinching/damage to the nerves could be considered a subluxation. That said this is the domain of a chiro, so of course this is something they do that others tend not to! Or are you telling me an internal medicine specialist should be expected to routinely set bones or do inner eye surgery?
2. Gee, I never took meds and now I'm pretty normal. Certainly helped me out. Unless the subluxation or whatever is causing endocrine issues, then this has no link. If you DO have that, then mental issues are probably a lower priority than adrenal failure, or bloody urine...
3. Hmm, then how is it that I can hear out of my right ear? Oh right, because the implant they implanted lets the vibrations reach my cochlea (which didn't happen before, see below) ... I fail to see how chiropractic practice has anything to do with hearing. All of the enervation in that area are in the skull, none of that passes through the atlas and as such the spine has -nothing- to do with them.
4. Can't comment with this. Cancer is a bitch. It's also runaway processes at a cellular level. It's waaay below the 'level' the CNS can influence. Perhaps some systemic change influenced by a subluxation aggravated or triggered something that was benign or otherwise not yet being cancer - but saying correcting such a thing is curing cancer is retarded. ... I fail to see how chiropractic practice has anything to do with hearing. All of the enervation in that area are in the skull, none of that passes through the atlas and as such the spine has -nothing- to do with them.
There. Had to get rid of some of that troll feed... it was going to go bad soon!
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Well, you can't deny that issues between the CNS and the guts it enervates could have some kind of effect... though unless serious enough to be an emergency it wouldn't be something major. Perhaps just a degradation in one of a few systems (eg lowered endocrine output?) Taking that example, such a thing could push an already stressed or damaged system "over the brink" - snowballing into an actual acknowledged problem.
Now, figuring out exactly what and to what extent to such a degree of certainty that you can point a finger and say "I told you so!" is probably a bit beyond us right now...
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
> A vanilla install of firefox doesn't seem that bad - but
> once you add a handful of addons, things do get
> leaky as hell.
> Would that be Mozillas fault, or the addon writers?
Howsabout leaving all the cutsie features for addons, rather than hard-coding in every addon that's been downloaded a dozen times or more?
* get rid of spellcheck, etc, etc, etc
* get rid of the relational database to store bookmarks and various settings. We all know how successful binary data blobs like the Windows Registry turned out... !NOT
Showing my age. I remember years ago all the "about:kitchen_sink" jokes about Mozilla 0.9x. It was a breath of fresh air when Phoenix (later renamed to Firebid and then to Firefox) came out. They actually got rid of the usenet news and the email and the HTML website builder. That greatly reduced the memory footprint and sped up the browser.
But then they went back to their old ways. Remember how AOL f***ed up Netscape when they tried to make it into a OS-on-top-of-an-OS? Seems like the Mozilla foundation is repeating that mistake. I don't want a f***ing "application platform" with a buttload of built-in features, I want a web browser.
One reason for the occasional freezes on the linux version is due to the SQLite RDBMS which is used to store a bunch of stuff that belongs in straight text files. Don't blame the people that wrote SQLite. A real RDBMS is supposed to do stuff like fsync() to commit transactions and ensure database integrity. Then again, an RDBMS is usually intended to be run on a dedicated server, not as part of the infrastructure of a stinking web browser.
Another stupidity in the linux version is the braindead insistence on dereferencing symlinks. Here's what happens... .doc file, I set the "helper application" to /usr/bin/abiword /usr/bin/abiword is just a symlink to /usr/bin/abiword-2.7, which in turn is a symlink to /usr/bin/Abiword-2.7. /usr/bin/abiword to /usr/bin/Abiword-2.7 /usr/bin/Abiword-2.8, and /usr/bin/Abiword-2.7 is removed. .doc file, and Firefox starts crying about "application not found".
* first time I run into a
* but
* Firefox "corrects" the application name from
* I do a system update, and there's a version bump to
* I click on a URL to a
If Firefox wasn't so braindead, and was willing to accept what I had typed in, rather than de-referencing it, it would've found /usr/bin/abiword, which is properly symlinked to /usr/bin/Abiword-2.8, And this doesn't even begin to address applications that respond differently, *AND EXPECT DIFFERENT PARAMETERS* based on which symlink name thay're invoked with. At one point, I ended up hacking into the chrome directory, grepping for "/usr/bin/Abiword-2.7" in a config file, and replacing it with "/usr/bin/abiword". When that config info ends up in an SQLite RDBMS, that hack is no longer possible.
Oh yeah, this message is coming to you via Opera. If I had a million dollars, and access to a bunch of coders, I'd love to launch a project to backport the latest HTML implementation to Firefox 2.x.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
I haven't programmed in a long time, but isn't this just a matter of a compiler switch to make it quadword-aligned? If the program is asking the OS for blocks of memory and not addressing it itself what does it matter?
Wait, what? They already have an undo close tab feature - right-click the tabs bar and find it in the menu or just hit Ctrl-Shift-T...
for our 64-bit HTML?
Actually I'd say if you have back problems, like a serious crick in your neck from say...hunching over PCs all day? Then they are fricking great for that. I went to one last year and after 40 minutes of adjustment I haven't needed to go back and the constant neck cracking and stiffness is gone. Anything else? yeah they are full of shit but I've found that true of EVERY medical profession. I mean have you noticed how your doc will push whatever the big pharma guy is offering the vacation package for this year? I can always tell which big pharma rep has been by by what the doc is preferring.
As for TFA? Jesus tap dancing Christ for the love of all that is good and holy DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE RESPONSIVENESS please please please!
I've had to end up ditching Firefox for the moment because after the 3.6 branch frankly I've found it unusable on anything less than a 3GHz P4 with HT. Since I have to support customers from ALL walks, from the latest multicores to netbooks and the standard 1.8Ghz-3.2GHz office boxes I need a browser that will at least give basic functionality on netbooks and MOR office boxes and FF? Doesn't do that, not even close.
A good example is the 1.8GHz Sempron with 1.5Gb of RAM I use as a nettop. This is more powerful and has more RAM than your average Atom netbook yet just launching a tab can slam the CPU to 100% and take away control from the user for up to a minute and Lord help you if that tab has a flash video because you are talking a couple of minutes of CPU slamming. A browser should NEVER take control away from the user! And I have noticed you can launch FF and walk away and a couple of hours later the memory usage will have doubled and will eventually cause the machine to hit swap even when you haven't done anything. Again this is unacceptable.
Compare this to the Chromium based browsers on the same nettop (I prefer Comodo Dragon as it has some extra security features not found in Chrome/Chromium) and I can surf for hours and NEVER lose control or responsiveness and I can launch a video tab and have it slam the CPU for only a couple of seconds before returning to normal and again NEVER lose control of the browser. I didn't believe there could be THAT big a difference as the Chrome guys were always crowing about....until I tried it myself. Monitoring the CPU and RAM usage as well as how long the browser took to respond was like night and day, and I had the same two extensions on both, ForecastFox and ABP, so one can't blame it on extensions, it is the browser.
So please FF devs, fix the responsiveness and CPU/memory usage, okay? Going 64bit is nice and all but there are literally tens of millions of machines from the P4 era happily doing their jobs, not to mention brand new Atom single cores being put into netbooks as we speak. Firefox is simply unsuitable for purpose on these machines and until this problem is fixed I've had to replace FF with Dragon on my default install CDs, even though I've been with FF for years and years. It really is a shame but one can see it for yourself by simply monitoring CPU usage or typing about: memory in any Chromium based while having FF running. Check the numbers yourself. Pretty jarring.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Maybe it would help if you ran an up to date browser.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
If you run a 32 bit process multiple times under a 64 bit os, it will use ("not leak") More memory. Users often don't have a choice in this, but developers have!
One of the things MS states is " Working set. WOW64 increases the size of the application's working set.". It s impossible to set a number on this, but i bet if you have an odd applications that uses a lot of small resources this increase might be very noticeable. Users night decribe this as a memory leak, but since it is by design, this will not be confirmed. Especailly since nobody will provide tools to determine this overhead, since the logical solution is to go 64 bit instead.
For developers the solution is simple: offer a 64 bit version. Users only have a choice if a 64 bit verions is available, and they will choose 64 bit if the OS is 64 bit.
THis is yet an onther reason to abandon java and flash, it is part of the browsing expierence, but the browser developers barely have an influence on these components.
The biggest reason to switch to 64-bit on Windows is to use more than 2GB of RAM (since 32-bit apps get a 2GB userspace / 2GB kernelspace virtual memory split). However on Windows 7 64-bit, apps marked as Large-Address-Aware get the full 4GB of virtual address space to themselves. The only 'disadvantage' is that you have to stop using any tricks which assume that the full range of pointer values won't be used; it's just a runtime flag stored in the executable which tells the OS to let it have the full 4GB if possible.
The one time I ported an app to 64-bit, memory use grew by around 50%. Maybe that's not typical. But for me it means I'm going to try my damndest to keep an app 32-bit using the LAA flag until I really truly need that 16PB address space.
Between running Google+ and Pandora in Pin-As-App tabs, and my other regular browsing, FF has been slurping up resources in my Slackware and Arch installations like there's no tomorrow. It's getting old. Maybe today's project should be getting to know Chrome/Chromium?
Nocturnal Slacker
Sorry, but Firefox devs shouldn't be asking what the public expects. They should have enough sense to know two things: First is that if their market is demanding it. Second, as developers, the benefits over 64-bit native vs 32-bit virtualized.
To be perfectly honest, I feel the reason they are reluctant is the shear stupidity of a lot of their users. People who insist the memory footprint is already too big. All the bells and whistles features of memory caching, history, prefetch, javascript, plugins, all spread across the 50-100 tabs in a browser window that's never closed add up. With 64-bit allocation, this memory bloat effectively doubles. I am sure there is some fat to be trimmed, and leaks to be plugged, but the real problem are the tradeoffs for speed, useability, and some absurdly unreasonable user expectations.
But honestly, at this point I will only believe a 64-bit native Windows build from them when I see it. They have been promising this for around 5 years now with every major release. Yes, they build 64-bit nightlies, but they always stop at the betas, and have never delivered on their release promise. Not everyone wants to be the guinea pigs, and the same code builds into a fully functional 64-bit product on all of the FOSS platforms.
Disclaimer: I am a sometimes contributor to both Firefox and Chromium, and helped porting these apps to FreeBSD, where both build and run 64-bit native on the appropriate platforms.
He may well be so, but where I live the only service that has managed to do anything for my wife's back pain is the local Chiropractor. I don't necessarily buy the BS behind it, but the actual procedure (basically crunching bones back into place) works much better than massage in this case.
Of course it wouldn't be the first time someone discovered a technique that works and retrospectively invented some oobie-doobie theory in an attempt to explain it.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
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.
That's ridiculous. I think that people just want Firefox to *work* on their latest computer, and they don't want to care about either "how many bits their computer has" or whether their OS is 32 or 64 bit or whether the version of Firefox they just downloaded is 32 or 64 bits. Why even ask questions like what people expect from a 64-bit build?
I'm pretty sure "__misaligned_access" in that stack trace is a red herring. Notice the large offsets and multiple frames blamed on the "same function". It's probably a section of ntoskrnl for which you don't have full symbols.
In theory you can get a decent stack trace (or even stack traces for all threads) by following the instructions on How to get a stacktrace with WinDbg. In theory. I tried once and got about as far as you did.
The shareholder is always right.
That was a dump from window's sysinternals process explorer --
which is configured with the dll for the debugger you mention
(C:\Program Files\Debugging Tools for Windows (x64)\dbghelp.dll)
and with downloaded symbols in standard location
(C:\Symbols)
So....I might get more out of winDbg, but since procexp seems to use .dll and symbols, wouldn't be extremely convinced of the need to go about doing it in winDbg (though I have used it to examine kernel core dumps...(such joy!)...
the same