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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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nightly-tester-tools/
Anyone with average computing requirements, more than half a brain, and 4GB or less of RAM.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
What?
I do not normally like to contradict someone in a technical field such as this one unless I am a really big expert (but I have looked into 32 vs 64 bit quite a lot) in that field but I am pretty sure everything you have just said is complete crap.
64 bit has many many benefits above and beyond the obvious and very nice ability to use more RAM and execute bigger instructions.
But no I have seen no evidence nor heard anyone who seemed to know what they were saying say that it uses significantly more RAM.
If it is using more it making use of it and making the program run better, but it can use less as well and I have even heard that because it does not have to use the x86 emulation (I know it is not technically emulation) that it saves RAM usage.
And RAM is cheap, oh so very cheap, extra usage of RAM is not a drawback at all anymore.
And for your argument it would never use its benefits, what world do you live in? /. and more processing power would not hurt for that let along normal JavaScript; And whole 3D games are now being run in the browser so it is eminently important that we get x64 versions of these browsers out immediately as game developers have already stretched the browser far past its ability to handle it.
my computer can barely run
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
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
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.
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.
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
The whole reason for nspluginwrapper is that you're using a 64-bit build but your plug-ins are 32-bit.
That is _exactly_ one of the reasons that Firefox is not shipping 64-bit on Windows yet (what the article is about).
So no, the only way to get rid of nspluginwrapper is to either use a 32-bit browser or not use 32-bit plug-ins. Well, or do something like Firefox on Mac, which involves shipping two copies of the code so the plugin-container process can be 32-bit...
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...
Well, or do something like Firefox on Mac, which involves shipping two copies of the code so the plugin-container process can be 32-bit...
Which is what the article's talking about doing.
*snip*
Don't blame the people that wrote SQLite.
Indeed, don't - blame Mozilla for not using SQLite correctly.
Using SQLite for history and bookmarks isn't such a bad idea, imho - by itself, SQLite is pretty damn light-weight (to the point where SQLite authors recommends to use it as a replacement for ad-hoc file storage). The problem with FireFox is it does things wrong - writes data too often, and writes it from the GUI thread and thus blocking the GUI. But having history and bookmarks in SQLite means you can do some pretty fast searches in it - might not be of value to you, but for some of us it's invaluable.
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.
Good thing it's in mimeTypes.rdf in XML format, then? :)
Coffee-driven development.