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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.
What I'd like to see Mozilla bring back is an un-bloated browser.
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.
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.
Probably because flash, java, and other plugin makers are so slow to move to 64 bits. Not to mention many out there feel a browser should not use more than 4 gigs of ram and is a light text and graphics reader. Not a minature operating system running complex ajax applications
That, after all, is a job for Emacs.
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.