Mozilla Dropping 64-Bit Windows Nightly Builds For Now

hypnosec writes "Plans for 64-bit Firefox for Windows have been put on hold by Mozilla in a bid to concentrate more on the 32-bit version. Eliminating the 64-bit nightly builds was proposed by Benjamin Smedberg, a Firefox developer, last week. Some of the reasons Smedberg cited include missing plugins for 64-bit version; lack of windowproc hooking which facilitates smooth functioning of whatever plugins are available; and the inability to work on the crash reports submitted for the 64-bit versions because they were not on high priority. The proposal, it seems, has been accepted as is evident from this bug report." The bug tracking system seems unable to differentiate between 64-bit and 32-bit builds, causing a few issues since Windows 64-bit builds are much buggier. They also intend to reintroduce 64-bit Windows nightlies some time next year.

Comments

Blame Microsoft

[aristotle-dude]

This is actually something that you can blame them for directly. On operating systems like OS X, you could run 64bit programs in OS X running in 32bit mode if you had a 64bit processor. The program would work but it would only have access to a maximum of 4GB and this was not a problem if you had only 4GB of memory in your machine anyway.

Microsoft took a different approach because there is very little hardware abstractions in their code base even within the Win32 API. They run their code at a much more bare metal level and so you cannot run 64bit apps on a the 32bit version of windows even if you have a 64bit machine. Microsoft even has its own separate API layer that only exists on the 64bit version to run 32bit apps on it. OS X and possibly linux seem to be able to run other bitness apps pretty seamlessly.