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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.
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.
The "39% less" is telling in itself. You can't get to a "39% less" without multiple and quite a few crashes. If it had been a number like 50%, it could be attributed to a small sample size, but 0.39 isn't close to any small divisor.
So they're telling us that it still crashes quite a bit.
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
What's really needed is a version of Firefox that doesn't use so much fucking memory that we need a 64-bit version.
With two slashdot tabs open my Firefox is current using 700Mb of memory.
Yes, I just restarted it. Before the restart it was 1.5Gb for those same two pages.
I installed the 64-bit version a few months ago when the 32-bit version finally became completely unusable for basic web browsing.
PS: Google Chrome is better, but not much - 500Mb. IE can do it in a "mere" 200Mb. WTF happened to 'coding'?
No sig today...
They were concentrating on removing the useful features, randomizing UI and adding new social media and video chat buttons. Having a stable and optimized binary was never a priority on Mozilla's business plan.
> It's been more than 15 years since the first 64bit OSes... What was Mozilla waiting for?
With 32-bit Firefox, there was a sane upper limit on how much memory the program could use with a 32-bit address space. With a 64-bit Firefox, there is no sane upper limit on memory that Firefox can consume. Think Godzilla or other giant monsters tearing through a modern city meme.
Mozilla was protecting us all!
Firefox could now consume as much memory as . . .
. . . as . . . as . . . Java 64-bit with -Xms=64000m -Xmx=128000m
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
What's really needed is a version of Firefox that doesn't use so much fucking memory that we need a 64-bit version.
x86-64 is about much more than the address space.
PS: Google Chrome is better, but not much - 500Mb. IE can do it in a "mere" 200Mb. WTF happened to 'coding'?
Being only for Windows, I imagine IE makes more use of the OS libraries. Firefox and Chrome are available on multiple OSes, so they need to include a lot of cross-platform libraries.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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.
What's really needed is a version of Firefox that doesn't use so much fucking memory that we need a 64-bit version.
It's not their fault. It's mine.
I take efficient streamlined console applications and rewrite them into bloated quirky slow web applications with 100% Javascript front ends.
I crush your tiny browser.
Actually, it's not my fault. That's just what my clients ask for.
Who cares? I have 16GB of RAM, even running 2 games and my web browser I don't start paging. As long as it makes things faster please for the love of god use my RAM.
What add-ons do you have installed? Insane memory usage like that is usually due to broke add-ons.
For comparison I fired up an instance with only uBlock and 14 Slashdot tabs and it's using 330MB.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
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
Also when people had 4GB RAM max on their computers there was no advantage of a 64bit OS. The 64-bit applications are larger and they are not faster. If the 32-bit version of Firefox crashes more then it's because they aren't spending as much time maintaining it.
x86-64 is about much more than the address space.
Please enlighten us. Ignorant mortals might think they're compiling the exact same code.
More and larger registers. SSE1/2 instructions guaranteed, these are optional in x86. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There's even a Linux project called x32 to make use of these features, while limiting the address space to 32 bits per process for potential speedups. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
In my experience Firefox crashes because the memory leaks cause it to reach the 2GB per-32 bit process memory barrier, then it crashes. Now commit charge can grow to 8TB before crashing!
64-bit applications can be faster if the code benefits from the twice available registers.
Hate to be the "it works for me guy" but Firefox's memory footprint has dropped continuously and is widely recognised as being much smaller than Chrome's to the point where Google started removing the tools needed to analyse memory use as it was constantly being used against them.
If Firefox is using more memory than Chrome you are doing something very wrong with your plugins or profile. If Firefox is using 700MB for 2 slashdot tabs, you're doing something very wrong with your plugins or profile.
Maybe you should nuke the entire thing and install fresh.