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."

Comments

Memory!

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

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...

Re:Memory!

[TheLink]

More like it'll be able to leak more than 4GB of memory.

Re:App idea that is directly related to this!

[MightyMartian]

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.

Oh great.

[MaxBooger]

64-bit Firefox: Now with 192 gigabytes of memory leaks!

Re:App idea that is directly related to this!

[MightyMartian]

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".

Re:64-bit is a misfeature

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:If Mozilla has no idea what to expect

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

(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.

History repeats

[Wonko the Sane]

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.

Re:Why ?

[TheRaven64]

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:

• In 64-bit mode, you have more registers available. This makes makes compiling JavaScript easier.
• You can store a 63-bit integer or a 32-bit floating point value in a JavaScript pointer and only promote them to real objects wrapping 64-bit values when an operation would lose precision. This reduces memory required for JavaScript.
• 64-bit, on x86, implies the existence of SSE. This means you can generate efficient SSE code instead of slow x87 code.
• Most of your other apps are increasingly going to be 64-bit, so launching a 32-bit app will result in swapping in a huge number of 32-bit versions of shared libraries.
• 64 is bigger than 32, and customers want more of those bit thingies.

Re:If Mozilla has no idea what to expect

[WrongSizeGlass]

Then why make a 64 bit version at all?

Maybe they need an excuse to change the version to 6.4?

Re:Why ?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Eh?

[kripkenstein]

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.

I am a Firefox dev and a Linux user. Mozilla is definitely not focused on Windows, in fact many of us devs use Linux (I am posting from Ubuntu right now), and many of the rest use OS X. Windows is in the minority.

There are 64-bit builds available from our build system, but we don't promote them. The reason is that we don't spend as much effort on QAing 64-bit builds, we have limited resources and are focused on the standard (32-bit) builds for the most part.

There are some good reasons for 64-bit browsers, for sure, but AFAIK none of the major browsers make that a priority. For example, there is a 64-bit IE9, however it ships with a hobbled JavaScript engine (without JITs), so clearly they don't intend it very seriously.

In any case, given that Firefox is open source, anyone can build a 64-bit version. I believe several Linux distros ship a 64-bit Firefox, for example. There used to be some problems with running 32-bit Flash in it, but I have heard that is workable now too.

they really needed that

[roman_mir]

they truly needed that, because soon enough they'll run out of 32 bit integers they use for version numbering.

Re:What do I expect? Nothing

[onefriedrice]

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.

Re:If Mozilla has no idea what to expect

[aix tom]

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.