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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.
I am not a programmer, I'm just a systems guy. I mainly use Mac and Linux, and 64-bit is something I've Just Done for some time now since the introduction of EM64T, however the few times I need to mess with windows the way it works with 64-bit just baffles me as to how 'hard' it seems to be and how 'little' 64-bit friendly / 64-bit stuff there is.
Why is that?
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
It's not just about memory, it's also about an enhanced instruction set that includes extra registers, addressing modes and the removal of some old x86 cruft.
It's 'hard' only because it's a huge - yes really - number of lines of code. Gigantonormous numbers.
Pointers are the main reason why software don't port between 32 and 64 bit easily. It was the same in the transitions from 8 to 16 and 16 to 32. The power of C is being close to the hardware, with less overhead. The curse of C is being close to the hardware, being harder to move to new 64-bit hardware. This is a known trade-off and it's worth it. People who don't believe it write hardware independent Java code etc, and as observed, their software usually don't provide all the desired features, hence people stick with the software written in languages closer to the hardware.
The switch from 32 to 64 is a lot less painful than 16 to 32, because the memory model didn't change.
Even if you are writing in C, most code is probably fairly agnostic to 32- vs. 64-bit. But if you do things like cast pointers to ints, or use byte-based arithmetic when interacting with structures or unions, then you'll run into trouble. C code that conforms to the standard should be fairly portable from 32 to 64 bit, though, and this is yet another situation where the value of the standard and well-designed code pays off.
That naturally limits FF's RAM consumption to the 32bit address space. Bravo, they've reduced it by 90%+!
The one point that I find quite laughable as a reason for stopping work on it is that there are not that many nightly 64-bit users.
Well, first, if you want to run 64-bit, you have to know that it exists in the first place. They offered a download link for awhile on the page where you could download the beta, Aurora and Nightly, but that disappeared over a year ago when I was rebuilding my computer. Not that that particular page was well known, either. I knew it was in the FTP site, I just had to look for it.
Yeah, I understand that the compiler has started putting out invalid code for the 64-bit version. OK, well then maybe the compiler needs to be changed or fixed then?
And browsers don't use more than 4GB?? Really?? I have the memory screenshot that shows me using 5GB of RAM under these nightlies. It happens every day and usually multiple times per day for me. It's not a bunch of tabs with media opened in them, it's one tab with Google Reader running for a few hours. Can't wait to see what happens when I switch to 32-bit, and I run out of memory before I run out of physical memory on my machine. And I've only got 8GB.
There will be a time when they HAVE to support 64-bit under Windows. They are talking about some point in 2013. I can't believe that a period of a few months is going to make it easier. There was a recent patch when they went from 19.0A1 to 20.0A1 that made the nightly unstable in a matter of minutes. Works in 32-bit mode, but doesn't in 64-bit. Is waiting nine months later after bad patches like that getting into the main code really going to help debug those bad patches?
Bryan
Firefox already runs 64 bit just fine -- over half of Debian installations are pure amd64. The problems here are caused by quirks in 64 bit versions of Windows only.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Worst pick-up line ever.
and going 64 bit has a significant memory cost -- for typical C++ code, around 33% extra.
Which is more than offset by not having the Windows 7 32-bit default limitation of 2 GB max per process, 3 GB max total memory.
16 GB ECC memory should be standard now, with RAM prices as low as they are.
The native Windows API was always a mess, and the 64 bits API is a case of "what were they thinking?!" even when compared to the other Windows ones.
Rethinking email
This doesn't hurt Windows, only Mozilla. Nobody really cares if their browser is 32-bit or 64-bit, but if they did, it just means they'd ditch Firefox in favour of another browser like Chrome.
If you want a 64bits version of Firefox, use Waterfox :)
http://www.waterfoxproject.org/
There's no 64-bit Chrome, so this is a moot point.
Riiight, because this hurts Windows.....how exactly? this just makes Mozilla look Mickey mouse, because IE comes in 64 bit and has for something like 7 years now poor lame Mozilla can't even write well enough to tell the difference between 32bit and 64bit bugs.
And I hate to break the news to ya, but most Windows users have no clue if what they are using is 32 bit or 64 bit nor do they care, it "just works" either way and that is all they give a shit about. Besides most won't notice this as they've switched to Chrome as the falling numbers clearly indicate.
As someone who used and advocated Firefox before it was even called firefox frankly.....sigh, the company just seems to be a trainwreck ATM. They've been all over the place instead of focusing on their browser which IMHO has gone to shit since around V6. I have to support plenty of low power devices and older office boxes and frankly Mozilla Firefox is just god awful on anything less than a dual core,especially if you have a decent amount of bookmarks, as it'll slam the hell out of the CPU when you do...well pretty much anything. This is why I moved my customers over to Comodo dragon (Chromium variant) several versions back, because between the UI changes, the bugs, and the CPU and memory usage frankly Firefox can't hold a candle to anything Webkit based, it just can't.
So frankly this doesn't hurt Windows in the slightest, it just makes Mozilla look lame but since more and more are jumping on Chrome I just don't see this affecting too many people.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
If you use the right types in C there is no problem at all.
No endless if statements needed.
However the world is filled with idiots who mix integer and pointer types.
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Sorry, but Chrome is x86, not x86_64, and thus only 32-bit. The process isolation it uses means that each tab can access 2GB of memory, but the program (and the plugins) are 32-bit. The only 64-bit browsers are Opera, IE and (up until now) FireFox.
Since windows does not have a 64bit version, there is little reason to insist on a 64bit firefox.
Since most windows applications are 32bit, there is no reason to insist on a pure 64bit OS.
Am I the only one seeing the endless problem here?
Good point. I don't know about XP/7 but Windows 95 used to pass a lot of 'handles' around which were actually pointers to internal data. If the size of the handles has changed, people may have been storing them as 32-bit integers and now discovering that they're a different size in 64-bit code.
Somebody notify this gentleman about the 64 bit versions of Windows which most people use.
If someone could make a compelling argument as to why it should be moved to 64-bit, I'm sure they would. Visual Studio has no problem allowing users to write, compile, and debug 64-bit programs -- I do it every day. I don't think they are even close to requiring more than 4GB of memory for themselves, so making a 64-bit version of it or most of Microsoft's own applications is just not needed, and would cause more issues, work, and overhead for nearly no perceivable improvement.
Then again, I've never had to try and debug one of my programs that required more than 4GB of code or data, so maybe there is an issue somewhere than I am not aware of.
To be fair, a 32-bit process with the LARGEADDRESSAWARE flag running on 64-bit Windows will have access to 4 GB of address space. Even for heavy Firefox users, 4 GB of memory generally ought to be enough if you decide ignore the effects of memory fragmentation.
[Microsoft's] windows OS is tied to the PC and to an old 32bit architecture which are both going to be deprecated soon.
You claim that the PC will be deprecated soon. What will replace the PC as a tool for medium-duty to heavy-duty creation of works of authorship, especially for software development?
I hope Firefox does thrive. It seems to be the best browser for web developers. I use several plugins to assist in debugging websites (Firebug and Firesizer for example), and the ability to view image info is also handy - Chrome, by default, does not make that easy.
It's possible that similar functionality is available for Chrome, but it's also nice to have one lean browser for real browsing, and a plug-in laden one for web development. IE I only use when I want to see what it breaks, although to be fair IE9 now does a much better job at rendering things the same way as Firefox and Chrome.
Anyway, I still find Firefox useful and hope it has a future. At this point in time, I can't see the lack of a 64bit version being a major drawback.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
You can still get 64-bit Firefox. It's called Waterfox and tends to lag behind the official version a bit, but it's there.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Well, that's of course a good argument. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. A more common argument would be that you want to eliminate 32 bit code in the long run. I assume that they for example have to maintain dual stacks of 32 and 64 bit versions of all their libraries, and getting rid of the 32 bit versions would be good for maintenance reasons. But that's still far away due to backwards compatibility.
I'm not sure why a 32-bit Linux application would need a 32-bit kernel? Unless it's poking deep in the guts of the system, in which it's most likely going to be tied to a particular kernel anyway.
32-bit linux applications need 32-bit glibc (or whatever libc/library they use) to run. Both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions can be installed on a 64-bit system just fine. Most of the time you'd run without the 32 bit libraries since you use lots more space with them, and until you get in to specialized programs, most come with 64-bit versions. On an application that doesn't use rpm, or some other packaging to tell you what libraries you need, you can be left guessing on what you need to install, I will give you that.
But thinking Windows is more friendly then Linux on 64-bit is insane. The whole capture the system call and write it to a different directory thing... verses /lib and /lib64. Yea.
Incorrect. Check the download link, and select more options.
You can select your architecture there, be it 32 or 64 bit. I've been running on 64-bit for quite some time already.
Manuals are your last resort only
Nice rant, but it's out of date with regards to Opera.
Bringing the out-of-process plug-in architecture across to Windows and Mac also brings another advantage: the ability to run plug-ins compiled for Intel 32-bit architecture from within a 64-bit Opera process. And 64-bit Opera is the other delightful gift we're giving you at Opera Labs this Christmas!
64-bit Windows and Mac have been in the works for a while, but we didn't want to release them until we had a way of running all plug-ins that's completely transparent to the user: This is now possible with the out-of-process plug-in architecture, so here we are! The 64-bit versions of Opera offer performance improvements in some specific areas and allow Opera to have more freedom in allocating memory.
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/64-bit-opera-and-out-of-process-plug-ins/
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Have you ever compared the contents of the Program Files and Program Files (x86) folders?
When 90%+ of the applications on 64-bit Windows are not actually 64-bit, then AC's snark seems to have some merit.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Make that 3 or 4 if they someone uses Windows 8 with Modern and non modern versions. :-)
http://saveie6.com/
Its not the lack of 64bit that is gonna kills it, its the performance. take something like Process Explorer and have it set to show you via the system tray what is going on as far as CPU/RAM/HDD (its in options>tray IIRC) and then run ANY webkit and FF side by side and see for yourself. Hell I can take a low power machine from 8 years ago and still run multiple tabs and even SD video and its just fine in Webkit, the video is smooth and the UI responsive, the exact same pages and video in Firefox? It'll spike the CPU so badly the entire UI becomes unresponsive (which is why you need the tray app because when FF does this you aren't gonna be switching) and if you are on a laptop or netbook all those spikes equal worse battery life.
Like I said I REALLY wish this weren't so, I used FF before it was even called FF and I used the Moz Suite before that, but its obvious to anybody with eyes the future is more and more laptops and low power devices and in that crucial arena FF just blows chunks and again i think it comes down to gecko. gecko ran fine when they were doing their own thing, but ever since they've been trying to match Chrome feature for feature by just bolting shit onto Gecko performance has gone WAAAAY down. I would say gecko needs a major rewrite, build a new gecko with sandboxing and isolation with a focus on low resource use OOTB, because as it is now anything webkit based just blows it out of the water.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.