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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!
>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?
I've been using 32 version and it's crashed maybe a couple times a year. I think their marketing team is incompetent.
love is just extroverted narcissism
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.
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.
Why the hell does a web browser require more than 4GB to run in a stable manner ? :-(
In an unstable manner. That it's reduced to 39% fewer crashes means that it still must crash quite a lot.
As for memory usage, I have three browsers running right now:
/proc/$(pgrep $b)/status; done
$ for b in firefox palemoon Mosaic; do printf "%s: " $b;grep VmPeak
firefox: VmPeak: 3310088 kB
palemoon: VmPeak: 1602116 kB
Mosaic: VmPeak: 61820 kB
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.
It is also about addressing memory past the 4 gigs mark. Handling big numbers faster 4 billion isn't that big of an integer anymore. Of course there is all that buffering and dealing with poorly written web pages.
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?
39% fewer crashes doesn't mean it crashes a lot.
If it crashes 1% of the time.
with the fewer crashes it would crash 0.71% of the time.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
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
I've been using 32 version and it's crashed maybe a couple times a year. I think their marketing team is incompetent.
Marketing or testing or...? I use Firefox 32 and it crashes once or twice a year, but I don't "surf" and go all Facebook-happy. I only have a certain set of pages I go to, and branch out a bit in Wikipedia... Therefore my data is uncommon to "normal" usage given the age groups and social preferences of Humans, in the USA, in my age group, with my background of life events, with my personality..... it goes on and on. That's so freaking stupid to make a statement of. If they gave more details on the "person" or "type of person" these estimates are based on, it makes a bit more sense but still isn't complete.
Anyhow, I see the parent comment is just one to try and drum up humor, but yours makes a point! I'm not in marketing, so I officially, to a marketer, "know nothing."
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!"?
with the fewer crashes it would crash 0.71% of the time.
Number of crashes are integers. There's no such thing as 0.71 crashed, so you'd have to measure a whole lot of crashes to arrive at that ratio. That's not reassuring.
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.
FF55 prevents the running of local flash files which is a non starter for me.
Very much this.
Not sure which browser I'll end up with, but it will not be FF55.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
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.
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
I am a pig with tabs and consider myself a power user. I've never had the impression that firefox was unstable, at least until they mentioned it...
love is just extroverted narcissism
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.
Valid questions and thanks for your reasoned response...
I used to have many add-ons installed. When upgrading to 64-bit FF (51) some months ago, I pruned the list down to those that I really use a lot (I started with none and then put them back as I missed them). I've not done a deep search for a 57+ compatible version for all of them -- I, frankly, gave up after trying to find replacements for perhaps three. I regularly use(d):
Adblock Plus :(
Copy Plain Text 2
DownThemAll!
Map This - unfortunately not compatible w/multiprocess
Print Edit
Restart
Tab Mix Plus
Private Tab
Restart is not really that important to me now that I don't have to do regular prophylactic restarts w/FF 64-bit.
Unfortunately, I had to (after an annoyingly long binary search process to identify the culprits) disable Private Tab after installing FF 55 because if Private Tab and Tab Mix Plus are both enabled, and a popup is opened, no popups can be closed AND the FF main window can't be closed w/o a 'kill' command. The lack of just Private Tab functionality is driving me nuts, but not as much as living without Tab Mix Plus was :(
I use FF because it is/was useful to me, not because I have a strong religious desire to do so. Most of the missing functionality I find frustrating when I go to Chrome or IE because of occasional browser compatibility problems is provided by these extensions (I've not researched to see if Chrome, via extensions or via non-obvious built in features, offers similar capabilities).
I am/was a developer, but on systems/server side and have never been very interested in learning/using client frameworks (and assuredly nobody would ever want to use my UIs -- even I hate them when I've occasionally been forced to develop them to get a project completed when other orgs flaked out on it) so I'm probably not going to become a FF dev or extension author and the world will probably be a better place as a result :(
I do understand the need for change and that incompatibilities may result (I've seen both sides of that coin with at least one system that I helped develop over 30 years ago and has been shackled with compatibility constraints but that without those constraints it would have probably lost, rather than gained, enterprise customers over the decades). However FF is just a tool to me rather like a microwave oven. If my microwave oven were to break and I could buy a brand new one with the same interface as the current one (which is remarkably good) I might buy that instead of investing in the research of the 100 other options out there to pick a better one. However, if a "similarly interfaced" oven is not readily and obviously available, I would be quite likely to do the research and would, in all likelihood, end up with different brand etc.
And, yes, I do suspect at least some of my memory issues were (are?) related to the add-ons. It was frustrating though trying to figure out which ones might be responsible -- perhaps that will get easier in the future (although, it really doesn't matter much to me with the current state as it's only slightly annoying rather than monitor slapping frustrating). I tend to view FF and all my favorite add-ons as one "product" -- each is of little use without the other so I tend to lump them together.
As FF 57 approaches, I will certainly look into it and play with it in a VM to see if I can get workable solution but I'm somewhat skeptical given that all of the extensions I've come to rely on are, just three months ahead of FF 57, still tagged as 'Legacy'. Hopefully my skepticism is misplaced.
(And, I won't engage in a Rust debate as I've not yet gotten around to playing with the language.)
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
I'm not the above poster, but I do know some situations where it's going to get in the way of some people's work. There have been a rash of presentation tools over the last few years that have been used to produce training materials in a lot of places (against all sane advice) and now all those things produced by abandonware are not going to work in people's web browsers.
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.
What has been your experience with Palemoon, if any? The folks at that project say they will support the legacy extension architecture indefinitely.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Don't know about yours addons specifically. But I've used various Tab add-ons, I found them all heavier on resources.
I've keep 100's of tabs open and most restarts where from updating.
Only addons I'm using are ublock origin, noscript, saved password editor, session manager.
Now I will say on linux FF can't handle nearly as many tabs on windows. A few years ago I ran tests where even a VM runnign windows under with less RAM could handle more Tabs.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
I've not tried Palemoon but thanks for reminding me of it as I look for alternatives to FF.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
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.