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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.