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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."
That means Firefox will still be limited to 4 PiB, which I'm sure it'll be reaching by the release of Firefox 12,458 next year. We need a 128-bit version.
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.
This space available.
What I'd like to see Mozilla bring back is an un-bloated browser.
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.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
/. Story when turned off: "turned off for now" /. Story now: "...never see the light of day"
Next story on /. : 64-bit Firefox sent to concentration camp.
This will coincide with XP ending support which is the last holdout.
If Mozilla does not want to double the work then just focus on 64-bit. Besides a few Vista users who went to 7, I do not know anyone who uses the 32-bit version. Usually they tell me some driver or piece of software is not compatible. Most cases running it in XP mode is better nowdays and by 2014 that hardware will very old!
Maybe release the long term version on that day as the last 32 bit version for 1 year? By 2015 no one should be running 32 bit XP software or operating systems anymore. I mean enough is enough!
http://saveie6.com/
Agreed. Opera works just fine with 32-bit plugins, though at this point there's little point to run them anymore. My setup is similar to yours.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
Too bad many of my clients have Cisco connect which only works with java 1.4.2 and IE 6/7 or some $1,000,0000 ERP abomination-ware tied to Oracle financials that only work on Java 1.4.2, not java 1.4.1, not java 1.4.3, but java 1.4.2.
These machines need to keep being reimaged from infections and as a result can't leave XP or IE 7 behind. Sometimes Firefox works believe it or not in quirks mode with these old java releases. The new ones are not compatible as they follow w3c and not the corporate standards MS/Oracle use.
I swear Oracle loves obsolete software and are doing this on purpose in order to make MS look bad and cost them revenue.
http://saveie6.com/
It's good to see that someone is being held accountable here. Benjamin Smedberg creates a shitload of negative publicity, pisses off a proportion of dedicated testers and he:
A. Gets a promotion
B. Is removed from positions of responsibility because he demonstrates poor judgement
C. Nothing happens
D. Gets a pay increase.
Answer = C
Come on guys at least make him wear a T shirt for a month that says, I must not override the recommendations of others in relation to 64 bit builds.
One of the key problems in organisations is that people aren't held accountable for poor judgement, or at least a running sheet is not maintained. Ben will probably continue to be promoted even through he has demonstrated that he has a fundamental lack of connection with what end users want. There is obviously something wrong occurring in the firefox mozilla groupthink and yet nothing is being done.
32-bit for desktop systems is outdated since more than a decade ago, and a complete anachronism for everything except backwards Windows. But even Windows caught up five years ago.
Somehow I have the feeling that the hostility of the closed and primitive Windows platform locks Windows developers in some kind of mental box, that causes them to be very limited in their thinking, when it comes to how to approach developing things or moving to 64-bit for example.
I mean, the damn thing doesn't even have a package manager. (No, Windows Installer doesn't even remotely count.)
Difference is the win32 environment is not free. As a result customers tend to hang on to old obsolete systems. As a result older incompatible and backwards operating systems still need to be supported like Windows 98. If you use dos like stuff in your windows 98 that is also compatible with XP, then it probably wont run on 7/8. Unless you run the 32-bit version of course. You couldn't have just made it XP compatible only in 2006 (the version most customers use) as people still had win98.
Linux doesn't have this problem. Or the opposite. It is free so who cares? Just re-invent the wheel every 3 years etc. In the real world where people care about results Windows does the job as it just works, is tested, not to mention people need software to get work done. That is not free my friend. So compatibility like what I described is a clusterfuck. Firefox 32-bit is needed as many use obsolete java plugins to use their expensive and shitty Oracle ERP.
It has nothing to do with developers being retarded and an inferior operating system. It is the economic reality in this new economy that new software must run on old platforms which hinder it, likewise many people want to run old software on newer systems too.
If Gnome 1.x was $120 with all the libraries and apis, and the linux kernel costs $50, you bet your ass Redhat 6.2 (its golden version) would be like XP today and millions would still use it. Why? Software would only work with that or the other and would be a pain to upgrade and expensive! Sorry but commercial software wont be made if it is free. If developers wont get paid they will seek other occupations and users would not be able to get work done.
http://saveie6.com/
Haven't these people heard of ASLR and heap spraying Do they not understand the concepts?
Without 64-bit, you have two huge security problems. The first is that there simply isn't enough address space to randomize well. Attackers can guess things. They guess right often enough that the effort is worthwhile. The second huge security problem is that the address space is easy to fill with code-equivalent data for a ROP attack. Actually, with Firefox you could even use real code!
Using a 32-bit browser in 2012 is kind of insane. It's near-complete security FAIL.
And by the year after that, they'll need 128-bit just for the firefox version number.
They also write crappy software, but they make it so it only runs on old OSes, so they can blame that vendor for any problems you have.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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.
bite my glorious golden ass.
As long as it's not the default version, it's not worth mentioning.
See extension breaking, status bar removal, tabs on bottom option removal, bugs unsolved for a decade etc. Pretty soon it will be firefox depicted as eating the glue.
I don't think Firefox developers have been eating the glue.
They've been snorting it.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
IE 10 32-bit has ASLR and heap spraying protection sandboxing right in. I think Chrome does as well but someone can correct me on this if I am wrong. Infact, the only thing Windows 7 64-bit has that the 32-bit does not is signed bootloaders and drivers to prevent rootkits.
ASLR has been part of 32-bit operating systems for years since Vista.
If someone knows the ram address of a particular dll they can target it anyway with a poke regardless of the bitness. You can still spray on a 64 bit system as well. It just will take longer but can gradually compromise it. THe best defense is a patched OS with a sandboxed browser to prevent the attack from evening happening. Thankfully with ASLR this can of attack is useless except on those with XP as ram addresses constantly change.
http://saveie6.com/
what's your name?
<br><br>
...just so i know never to hire you as a programmer (or a mathematician, engineer, physicist, etc)
Have been using Waterfox for some time now, has been great. Features less bloat and fewer annoyances then has been making it's way into the 32 bit releases of firefox.
IE 10 32-bit has ASLR and heap spraying protection sandboxing right in.
It barely works. There simply isn't enough address space to make it effective. This is like having a door using a 1-pin lock instead of a 7-pin lock. Picking a 1-pin lock is trivial.
You can still spray on a 64 bit system as well.
You can't usefully spray on a 64-bit system. To be useful, your spraying needs to cover a significant portion of the address space. (else you are unlikely to hit it when you trigger the bug) It also can't require more memory than the system has, and it can't need to run for months.
That means Firefox will still be limited to 4 PiB, which I'm sure it'll be reaching by the release of Firefox 12,458 next year. We need a 128-bit version.
Naw... it is two things. Cleaner code and the lack of 32bit library cruft in a system. However plugins like flash and even Java32-.vs.-Java64 make me think that well flash is crud and Java not as portable as it should/could be.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
What I would like to see is the web go back to geocities. Websites never consumed any significant resources, RAM/CPU consumption was most likely due to a bug, than website (like Slashdot) itself consuming it.
Good news. Even if it doesn't result in 64 bit final products soon it should provide more material for the Waterfox project to develop upon. As long is there is developer support from Firefox for the 64bit the onus is on the developer advocats of 64bit computing to prove that it can show a significant enough performance enhancement to be taken seriously and pushed to mainstream.
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While I realize that there are theoretically 32 bit versions of Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8 available, I have never seen one installed on a system. For the Mozilla team to say there will "never" be a 64-bit build for Windows is an asinine and bass-ackwards approach to maintaining compatibility with the OS.
If it's the plugin-providers causing the problem, then they deserve as much "Boo Hiss" as Mozilla does.
Let's try to keep up with the times. 64-bit Windows has been stable and standard for years!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
no actually i say it as if the op is a clueless moron
Then use Waterfox (http://www.waterfoxproject.org/)
> For the Mozilla team to say there will "never" be a
> 64-bit build for Windows
Which is something no one at Mozilla ever said. But don't bother reading what they actually said, just read the lies lazy reporters spouted instead.
What Benjamin said is that there are no plans to ship a final 64-bit product in the next several months.
Actually, that would be 16 EB. You were off by 4 orders of magnitude.
Don't most Windows computers (and I'd imagine all mainstream) support 64-bit now?
Most processors do but typically XP is 32-bit. Given it has a huge market share for such an old OS, one might guess say 30% of machines. According to Steam survey Windows 7 (32-bit) 14%, XP (32-bit) 10%, and that's gamers.
So you switched to Chrome, which is constantly changing, because you hated that Firefox was constantly changing. Gotcha.
1. XP is still one of the most popular if not the most popular OS in the world. 64-bit XP on the other hand is non-existent.
2. 32-bit vista and seven were used quite a lot in older computers that had less then 4GB of RAM. I have a netbook bought a couple of years ago that caps at 2GB that uses 32-bit seven for example. It works fine.
I am not a kernel level programmer here. Assuming a theoretical situation requires a theoretical application to gain that advantage. In other words, 2 TB of ram it would be harder to crack. But I do not have this nor does anyone outside of advanced servers usage.
Since only the most powerful servers have it I see it as offering no real advantage. XP users use PAE to go around the 4 gig limit hack anyway. So if I had 4 gigs of ram it would not matter if the OS is 32-bit or 64-bit. The memory addresses would be the same. If I had 8 gigs of ram I would have it extended if I ran XP with PAE so I would have an identical amount of memory addresses in either case.
That argument does not hold water. THe bitness doesn't matter as much as much as the code to implement all of the above. As it has been pointed out there are no real 64-bit browsers. IE has a 64 bit build just like Office but does not support it.
The security is made by the browser/OS with the code programmed in and it is independent as Chrome has heap protection at 32-bit as well. Unless of course the hack does get through then that 2 TB of ram will help :-)
http://saveie6.com/
Either make a portable website that works on every computer or mobile device users have. Or make a native app which, if your wish, can make extensive use of server-based HTML while still incorporating your "plugin" code. But exposing users to overhead, crashes and security issues of your custom code when your application is NOT running is indefensible.
So if I had 4 gigs of ram it would not matter if the OS is 32-bit or 64-bit.
Yes it would. The amount of physical RAM has nothing to do with this issue. The "P" in PAE stands for "physical", which only matters to the hardware and the OS kernel. A 32-bit app will never be able to see more than 4 GB, even if you have PAE or a 64-bit OS.
On a 32-bit system, every process gets a 4 GB address space. (the OS may steal 1 or 2 GB) You may have only 512 MB of RAM installed, or you may have 16 GB of RAM installed, but every process still sees 4 GB. If the process uses more memory than the amount of RAM, the OS will cheat by swapping. If the computer has more than 4 GB of RAM, you can only use the extra by running multiple processes.
On a 64-bit system, every process gets... a ridiculous amount of address space. (and again the OS may steal half) Every process gets this amount of space even if you only have 512 MB of RAM. The process could actually use all the space if you had a big enough swap file, but this isn't needed from a security perspective. For security, the idea is to scatter memory allocations around in a huge area so that the attacker can not guess where they are. If anything, the fact that you don't have enough swap file space to actually use the address space is good; it means that the attacker can't fill it with something that will help him.
On normal PC hardware, the attacker's job becomes at least tens of thousands of times more difficult with a 64-bit app. Because of the way attacks work, the difficulty factor is often squared. (they need to make two correct guesses) The attack becomes darn near impossible.
Since only the most powerful servers have it I see it as offering no real advantage. XP users use PAE to go around the 4 gig limit hack anyway. So if I had 4 gigs of ram it would not matter if the OS is 32-bit or 64-bit. The memory addresses would be the same. If I had 8 gigs of ram I would have it extended if I ran XP with PAE so I would have an identical amount of memory addresses in either case.
Leaving aside the fact that recent desktop versions of 32-bit windows (starting with XP SP2) are gimped to only allow 4GB of physical address space even when in PAE mode it's not physical addresses that matter for this attack, it's how the size of VIRTUAL address space compares with the amount of ram.
Suppose that the hacker has an exploit that lets him make the program run some bytecode from a address he specifies without applying security checks to it but can't find out before running the exploit where anything is in memory.
In a 32-bit app there is 2-4GB of usable virtual address space and modern systems have enough ram to map all of that virtual address space to memory. So a malicious script can fill a significant proportion of the virtual address space with it's crap and hence even with randomised addressing there can be a good chance of hitting a copy of the sprayed code when the CPU jumps to a fixed memory address.
In a 64-bit app running on current "64-bit"* PCs there is 140TB of virtual address space. No system on the market has enough ram to map more than a tiny fraction of this to memory. Therefore even if the attacker sprays enough copies of his code to fill physical memory he will still have only covered a tiny proportion of the apps virtual address space. If virtual addresses are randomised** then the exploit code is unlikely to hit a copy of the sprayed code when it jumps to a fixed memory address.
* Current "64-bit" PCs only have a 48 bit virtual address space and half of that is reseved for OS use leaving a 47 bit address space for apps.
** There is nothing that requires virtual addresses to have any correspondence to physical addresses. It's perfectly feasible to have a virtual address much higher than the highest physical address.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
AFAIK, I once tried 64-bit Win7 on my system with only 1.5GB of RAM, but decided to move back to 32-bit when I had to reinstall, and is what I am running right now.
referring to yourself in the third person is another sign of madness, apk... keep going though :)
poor little apk... full of stupidity, as per his usual
btw... fixed that bug yet noob?
or better yet... seen the light and dumped it altogether for the much more efficient (and bug free) one line equivalent i gave you?
wow! that you went to such effort to put together all that bullshit indicates i must have really hit a nerve... the truth hurts apk, your poor pathetic sod
re: "This was just "too, Too, TOO EASY - just '2ez'" & is every single time"
:)
you have no idea... but your attitude is what makes your bullshit soentertaining
"Then, where's yours here"
:)
refer here: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3058625&cid=41117989
"others here showed you don't even REALIZE processors FETCH instructions out of memory"... no they didn't... they merely demonstrated a rather primitive level of knowledge
refer here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3335057&cid=42377303
i know this is a pointless waste of time as you will neither read nor comprehend any of this and will continue your also pointless rampage of idiodic ranting, but i do like the thought of getting you all wound up
cheers "apkb"