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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."
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.
(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.
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
Then why make a 64 bit version at all?
Maybe they need an excuse to change the version to 6.4?
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
The truth is the probably have integrated the version number as an integer all over the place, and they are desperate to switch to 64 bit before the version number hits the 32 bit integer limit later in the year.
At the moment, 64-bit FireFox will only run 64-bit plugins (As I know, running Windows FireFox Nightly 7.0a1 x64 as my default desktop browser, And there are 64-bit plugins on Windows for Java and Flash). They're working on it, though.
And most of the memory leaks are being caused by poorly-written or resource intensive plugins (Like FireBug), and they're working on that, too. "about:memory" in nightly builds now lists a complete tree of what's using the allocated memory, and more reporters are being introduced all the time.