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64-bit Firefox is the New Default on 64-bit Windows (mozilla.org)
An anonymous reader shares a blog post: Users on 64-bit Windows who download Firefox will now get our 64-bit version by default. That means they'll install a more secure version of Firefox, one that also crashes a whole lot less. How much less? In our tests so far, 64-bit Firefox reduced crashes by 39% on machines with 4GB of RAM or more.
It's been more than 15 years since the first 64bit OSes... What was Mozilla waiting for?
61% of the time, Firefox 64-bit works every time!
...i'm now using pale moon because of those other issues.
Awesome. No, wait, I mean scary.
Holy WTF, how bad is the Firefox code that compiling it for 64 bit would affect it like this?
>How much less? In our tests so far, 64-bit Firefox reduced crashes by 39% on machines with 4GB of RAM or more.
What was it crashing from? OOM?
The news story here isn't what's happening, it's that it's happening now instead of a decade or two ago.
Why the hell does a web browser require more than 4GB to run in a stable manner ? :-(
Usually the problem is address space exhaustion. So by going to a 64-bit executable, the memory leaks are probably still there, but instead of crashing Firefox, it will just thrash the machine. That doesn't sound like progress to me.
Great news for the 5% of us that still use Firefox. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
(Am a Firefox user, but am thinking about moving over to Chrome in the next few weeks).
Summation 2
Maybe also Google will follow!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Exactly what I was thinking of!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Did they finally -after YEARS- fix the famous Black Screen caused by GPU HW acceleration? Just today, with the latest nVidia drivers, and a fully patched Windows 10 box, still have this problem. It occurs maybe twice a week. But talk about shit code in Firefox! I've never had any other problems with HW acceleration in other applications.
Life is not for the lazy.
Browsers support 3rd party plugins and often ship with some enabled by default, so it's not really possible to test everything. But I don't know what % of the crashes are from plugins vs. core code.
Would be nice to know. Probably a combination of all of the above but I assume Mozilla has metrics to say where the added stability comes from.
Too little too late.
Fuck mozilla.
I wish I had the same software you do, kind sir/madam/other, because all software crashes. Literally all modern software can crash, and I don't mean in a "let's test when it will break" mindset, but rather everyday use.
Good news for both remaining Firefox users!
Get Linux. My system software hasn't crashed in 19 years.
Well written software doesn't crash.
If it crashes, then it is a problem that needs to be addressed, and if you are going to address it, you should check to make sure the fix is more thorough.
If the software crashes, then there is a security risk. Because a crash is when something is happening that isn't expected, and that allows the hacker to take advantage of this.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
After many years of Netscape, Mozilla and Firefox, this year was the last nail in the coffin for me. At some update Firefox simply would run for some time (maybe a couple of minutes, mas a few hours) and silently drop any network access. I was already disappointed with many and frequent crashes, lot of websites that didn't work and so on... but really it got to an all-time low on quality and usability.
And it's on my work machine, where I don't go to anywhere "strange"...
All my windows machines have 64-bit Windows installed, but I have already installed the 32-bit version of Firefox on them (because that was the default at the time). How about automatically UPGRADING my 32-bit Firefox to 64-bit on machines that can handle it?
I have two Firefox tabs open to Slashdot and the total memory consumed by the three Firefox processes I see is about 250MB (private working set). How many extensions do you have installed? Any ad blocking? Script blocking? I tend to block as much stuff as possible.
Saying 'Windows' and 'secure' in the same sentence is an oxymoron.
I can understand complex software having unexpected memory leaks. It happens even to the best and more careful programmers. Even when using garbage collected languages, it's still easy to hold on to references longer than necessary, preventing memory from being freed up.
But when it does happen, a good developer will openly admit it happened, and do whatever it takes to fix the memory leak.
The problem I have with Firefox, and so many of its most ardent supporters, is that they refuse to acknowledge the problem even exists. Firefox's excessive memory usage is one of the main complaints against it. This has been reported by all sorts of users time and time and time and time again for many years. Even when presented with screenshots showing Firefox using totally unacceptable amounts of memory, the Firefox fanatics will continue to deny it's a problem.
It's even sillier when they make outrageous claims about Chrome having worse memory usage, when all of the evidence suggests otherwise. Sometimes the Firefox fanatics will trot out a nonsensical, unrealistic benchmark showing Firefox having a slight edge. Yet these benchmark results are totally inaccurate and cannot be reproduced under normal, everyday browsing scenarios.
To make a fucked up situation even worse, instead of figuring out how to reduce the memory usage problems affecting Firefox, we see Mozilla wasting time and resources on their Rust programming language abomination. If they couldn't get Firefox's memory usage down to a reasonable level comparable to Firefox's competitors, how the heck should we expect a new, immature programming language like Rust to somehow solve this problem?!
It's no wonder that Firefox's market share has dropped so low. When many people repeatedly see Firefox using many GB of memory after a short amount of casual web browsing, yet their reports are ignored or ridiculed, of course they'll ditch Firefox and use a browser that makes better use of the computer's resources.
Firefox's community, and its denial about the problems affecting Firefox, are Firefox's worst enemies.
We get a shiny new and slim browser we love it, we ask for more features, these features get added, the browser gets bloated, We get an other shiny and slim browser...
Netscape by 4.5 became Netscape Communicator with email newsgroups and a bunch of other stuff, took minutes to load up.
Internet Explorer was seen as a better options. Integrated into the OS, means it took a lot less time to boot up, and followed the standards a bit better so pages rendered better. Then by Version 6. It hasn't kept up with the standards, put a lot of effort in supporting Microsoft Crap like Active X, slow to render HTML, and was a security vulnerability.
Firefox was a clean fast browser, with just what is needed for a browser, stripped down interface, rendered fast and supported HTML 4 and CSS 2 like a pro. Then they kept on adding features, and allowing crashes and serious problems to gather. Its overall performance and HTML5 support began to lag.
Chrome was a cleaner and faster browser, all the stuff we liked about Firefox originally was there, and supports the new stuff much better and renders quickly... However now there is privacy concerns, and other issues, that make people question it.
Then across all this we had Opera saying "What about me!"
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
So they didn't fixed the crashing - they postponed it by throwing hardware into the problem.
Kudos, moz://a . On the Microsoft way. If at least you had the money to buy your way out, uh?
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
What's up with all the Firefox news? It's market share is what, 10%?
Who uses Firefox?
It follows that programs should be the same "bitness" as the OS they run on. 64-bit OS should only run 64-bit programs, else there will be problems emulating a 32-bit environment. And of course, you can't run 64-bit programs on a 32-bit OS.
Beware that 64 bits need more room: RAM. Like trying to run 64-bit Windoze 10 on a 4GB computer is either folly or a true exercise in patience. Especially when that follows the king of bloatware: MS Office (in 64 fat bits, of course!).
FF55 prevents the running of local flash files which is a non starter for me.
The millennial that doesn't like most of the stuff designed for millennials.
Sometimes the Firefox fanatics will trot out a nonsensical, unrealistic benchmark showing Firefox having a slight edge. Yet these benchmark results are totally inaccurate and cannot be reproduced under normal, everyday browsing scenarios.
10% better than "completely unacceptable" is nothing to brag about.
No sig today...
Waterfox is 64bits and gets rid of a bunch of cruft that Mozilla puts in Firefox.
Ceci n'est pas une
Seriously, that's your motto, "crashes 39% less!"?
in the last two years. How do you manage to get it to crash?
I've been using the 64-bit version of Firefox on my desktop PC for about a month.
The memory use of the application is regularly blowing up. Last week after leaving the PC and Firefox open for the day while I was at work, I came back home only to find out my computer crawling and Firefox process taking 10GB of memory. That's up from about 800MB at startup.
The memory reports aren't working either, so I can't figure out what's going on easily.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
We are seeing technology companies that are shockingly badly managed. Why is that happening? Are we experiencing a general social breakdown?
One small but indicative example: On the Mozilla Foundation Download Firefox in your language web page the 32-bit and 64-bit versions have the same file name!
The browser situation is very, very ugly. Firefox is now, basically, owned by Microsoft, who is apparently trying to destroy it. In the past, Google paid Mozilla Foundation $300 million each year (December 22, 2011) to make Google search the default search engine in Firefox. Google apparently didn't cause problems in the design of Firefox, even though it paid a shocking amount.
Now, I understand, Mozilla Foundation gets most of its money from Microsoft: Microsoft pays Yahoo. Yahoo pays Mozilla Foundation to make "Yahoo search" (actually mostly Microsoft Bing search) (April 16, 2015) the default search engine in Firefox.
The Thunderbird and SeaMonkey Composer GUIs have been damaged, apparently deliberately. File saves in the newer versions of both ask for a new file name, and don't suggest the last one chosen. The damage was reported several months ago, but has not been fixed.
Is that another example of Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Extinguish? People who feel forced away from Thunderbird may choose Microsoft software to replace it. Is that something Microsoft is trying to accomplish?
In my opinion, dishonest people should not be employed in management. In my opinion, the managers and members of the board of directors of both Microsoft and Mozilla Foundation who approved the dishonesty of sneakily re-configuring Mozilla Foundation products should be immediately fired, and not allowed to have management positions in the future.
Mozilla Foundation may be desperate now that it has lost the incredible amount of money paid by Google.
The 64-bit version also easily uses 1.5 times as much memory for the same set of pages as the 32-bit version. Frankly, I'd rather just stick with 32-bit: I'm running other applications as well that I like to see remain responsive, and not have all of my RAM gobbled up by a browser.
Maybe it will crash much less. I wouldn't be able to tell; Firefox hasn't crashed for me in years and years.
When this comes out, everyone will discover that they don't have any extensions anymore.
So, with nobody using your browser, it really doesn't matter if it's 16, 32, 64, or 128 bit.
What a misleading title, as most are. It makes it sound like this is the default browser that comes with Windows. Maybe reword it a bit. Something like "Mozilla provides 64bit Firefox to Windows users by default." Makes a little more sense and doesn't cause people to click on it because it sounds like something different.
Since FF 57 will be the death of Firefox in about three months due to the disabling of all "legacy" extensions (which is 100% of the extensions I use - some very useful ones that haven't been updated in quite some time and that I can't find WebExtensions equivalents for), Mozilla needs to get done whatever they expect to be adopted before then -- and defaulting to 64-bit seems to fall in this category. (FF 55 already broke two of my favorite extensions -- I can run either one of them without the other, but not both at the same time because attempts to close new windows/popups or even FF itself are completely ignored so I may go back to 54).
Some users will, without realizing it, upgrade to 57 and discover that the primary reason they use FF has vaporized and then move on to Chrome. Some, like myself, will probably stick around on 54...56 for a while but will begin to switch to alternatives because they want security related browser updates.
It's amazing to me that if one goes to the FF addon's page and types in some search terms like "video" or "mouse" or "screen" or "download" or "tab" and sorts by 'most users', perhaps 10% of the extensions are tagged as compatible with 57+. I wonder who Mozilla expects to use FF after November -- do they have some big marketing initiative planned to attract a bunch of new users -- perhaps there is an untapped market of extra-terrestrials that are just discovering the World Wide Web I'm not aware of?
(Although, I must admit, upgrading to 64bit FF was a good thing for me -- instead of having to restart FF once or twice a day, now I can just restart it once or twice a week -- when it gets to about 13 GB of virtual memory, it gets pretty slow even though I've got lots of free memory on my 32GB desktop).
FF - R.I.P. - I'll miss you, it was fun back when FF was fresh and innovative but, sorry, now it's an old toothless 97 year old hag which is about to break both hips in a dementia and alcohol induced suicide attempt jumping off a third floor balcony at the retirement home. It will be deadly, but it will be an unnecessarily painful and slow death. Come on, why not just announce that 56 is the last full release and that a few dedicated volunteers are going to try to issue patch releases on 56 for the most serious of security issues for a while?
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
64-bit Firefox has been the default on 64-bit Linux systems for over 10 years, like most software.
Why is the Windows ecosystem moving so slowly?
By the way, while it is true that 64-bit software uses more RAM by itself, mixing 32-bit and 64-bit software means that libraries are loaded twice. What a waste.
Does this mean Firefox will crash faster or slower?
I'm assuming that the 64-bit and 32-bit are being compiled form the same codebase, right?
Why would compiling to 64-bit be less crashy than 32-bit??
I remember it being the other way around, but that was due to 32-bit assumptions causing problems when compiling to 64-bit... but I'd never heard of it being this way around!
That's a very bizarre thing to mention. So does it crash *more* often with 3GB RAM on 64-bit?
How can this seriously still be a thing in 2017? I don't get it. What the hell is wrong with Windows users that they have accepted anything less for SO LONG? If your OS can't keep up with technology from 14 BLOODY YEARS AGO, get a better OS!
There is absolutely no excuse for this. It just makes me despise Windows users that much more for being complete idiots—at least the technically-minded ones who know better.
Since FF 57 will be the death of Firefox in about three months due to the disabling of all "legacy" extensions (which is 100% of the extensions I use - some very useful ones that haven't been updated in quite some time and that I can't find WebExtensions equivalents for)
Completely seriously, which extensions are those? What do they do? Are they absolutely necessary for your work? (As in, are you sure the useful features haven't been integrated into Firefox at this point? if you are a developer, have you checked if the Firefox Developer Edition meets your needs without all those debug/dev extensions?).
And if those extensions really are that important, and there is no replacement or change to your current workflow/processes that can address it, how does switching to Chrome solve those problems? Why not write a new extension yourself? Help fund another developer to do it? Contribute to improving the community, rather than jumping ship to a proprietary competitor and giving them even more of a stranglehold over web standards. With Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, all using Chromium engine, Firefox is really the last free software engine we have to prevent a Google monopoly with closed proprietary standards like Internet Explorer did years ago.
Firefox is jettisoning their old insecure extension code, this is a good thing. Transitions are always painful even when done correctly, but sometimes they need to be done. Help them if you can.
It's amazing to me that if one goes to the FF addon's page and types in some search terms like "video" or "mouse" or "screen" or "download" or "tab" and sorts by 'most users', perhaps 10% of the extensions are tagged as compatible with 57+.
We're several months from release still, of course not every extension will be updated yet. I expect the number to grow as we get closer. Mozilla is even working directly with some high-profile extension authors like uBlock to get WebExtensions right; Firefox's implementation will have more features and power than Chrome's. Better extensions will be coming, and I hope it will actually push Chrome to innovate and improve their implementation too! Has Google ever added the missing features that made Firefox extensions better in the first place? Maybe this is the kick that will make them do so.
And for plugins that have not been touched in years: do you feel comfortable running code that is no longer maintained? That uses an old plugin/extension system that is insecure, part of the reason they're switching to WebExtensions in the first place? Mozilla announced this upcoming change last year, it's not like they're surprising anyone. I'm skeptical to use any software or extension that I can't confirm is maintained in case of security or other bugs.
when it gets to about 13 GB of virtual memory, it gets pretty slow even though I've got lots of free memory on my 32GB desktop
This could be related to all of those old extensions you're using. I've seen reports that a lot of the memory leaks attributed to Firefox are actually from poorly-written extensions and not core Firefox itself. They've done a pretty good job at improving core Firefox's performance in recent releases, and the changes in 57 should improve it even more significantly.
FF - R.I.P. - I'll miss you, it was fun back when FF was fresh and innovative
This is exactly why 57 is a big release! They're switching to a new web content engine that will improve performance and security, and it was written in a new programming language Rust that they researched and developed themselves. I think designing your own language to improve security and performance is about as innovative as you can get, and I really appreciate that managers at Mozilla encouraged experimenting with Rust rather than shutting it down with "just use C++" or whatever argument. I encourage them to keep experimenting and innovating!
Plus not to mention the WebExtensions yo
Indeed. Your graphics driver may crash, taking Xorg with it and all your running programs but at least the daemons and the kernel still run unaffected.
Your computer hardware is broken somewhere and you're blaming a software program.
Anyone who thinks that my analysis in my grandparent comment is useful has evidence that I am more clear-minded than some people about technology management.
From the Mozilla Foundation Download Firefox in your language web page:
Not the same file:
37,083,648 Firefox Setup 55.0.1_64-bits.exe
34,050,760 Firefox Setup 55.0.1_32-bits.exe
I made a mistake. I should have written:
37,083,648 Firefox Setup 55.0.1.exe (64-bit version)
34,050,760 Firefox Setup 55.0.1.exe (32-bit version)
I added "_64-bits" and "_32-bits" to the file names when I saved the files. We support some 32-bit computers so we need both.
Mozilla Foundation should use file names that indicate the difference.