Mozilla Brings Back Firefox 64-Bit For Windows Nightly Builds

An anonymous reader writes "Last month, Mozilla Engineering Manager Benjamin Smedberg quietly announced that the 64-bit version of Firefox for Windows would never see the light of day. After what he referred to as 'significant negative feedback,' Smedberg has announced he has reviewed that feedback, consulted with his release engineering team, and has decided on a modification to the original plan: Firefox 64-bit for Windows may still never be released, but nightly builds will live another day."

Comments

I was using Waterfrox

[Jafafa Hots]

The 64 bit branch of FireFox and loved it, it was much faster. Some recent update broke compatibility and I have to do a total uninstall and then reinstall while backing up every Firefox thing elsewhere to restore, since it uses the same profile, etc.

Too lazy to work out the issue, in other words.

But if you have a nice fast 64bit machine, try Wtaerfox, you'll probably love it. Unless it sucks now.

Re:I was using Waterfrox

[hairyfeet]

Pale Moon is also quite good and has a 64bit version although they compile their for newer CPUs (Athlon64, P4 and above) but if you are running 64bits you probably aren't using an ancient CPU anyway.

But the FF numbers have been dropping and its from nothing but shit like this, being arrogant and not listening to their customers. After all that is EXACTLY what they are, for without them Google wouldn't pay Mozilla for the search rights and the whole company goes down the drain so its time they started actively listening to their customers instead of pissing them off.

This is one thing we have so much better than we did when FF first came out, it no more "use this or get stuck with IE" nonsense, no more having the entire web coded for IE quirks, now we have this great bounty of choice so if any company refuses to listen to us we can just go somewhere else without having to jump through hoops or deal with a crippled web experience. Just off the top of my head I can name Chrome, Chromium and Comodo Dragon in the Chromium based camp, FF, Pale Moon, Waterfox,Kemelon and Comodo IceDragon in the gecko builds, then you got the more "one offs" like Safari and Opera, that's ten browsers that will ALL render the web just fine, so if the numbers for FireFox go down they have nobody to blame but themselves. maybe next time instead of just pulling a boneheaded stunt how about actually asking your customers first, huh?

Same Bugs as Firefox 64-bit

[CritterNYC]

Waterfox is just Firefox built as 64-bit with some compiler switches and a name change (required by trademark guidelines). It's not a fork and there are no additional bug fixes. It has all the bugs that Firefox does when compiled as a 64-bit binary. You're far better off sticking with Firefox 32-bit which works just fine under 64-bit Windows.

Never happened

[gfody]

I've been using 64bit nightly since the idea of dropping the builds was mentioned in bz. There was a big debate and a bunch of tech news sites picked up the story and now the latest is that they're being "restored". But the 64bit nightly builds never stopped! I'm sure this story is just to get everyone to STFU about it already.