Mozilla Stops Firefox 64-bit Development
Weird, It looks like Mozilla has given up on developing Firefox 64-bit and it seems the decision is final.Citing reasons that Firefox 64-bit is a "constant source of misunderstanding and frustration," the engineer wrote that the builds often crash, many plugins are not available in 64-bit versions, and hangs are more common due to a lack of coding which causes plugins to function incorrectly.
Mozilla engineering manager Benjamin Smedberg has asked developers to stop nightly builds forFirefox versions optimized to run on 64-bit versions of Windows.
A developer thread posted on the Google Groupsmozilla.dev.planning discussion board, titled "Turning off win64 builds" by Smedberg proposed the move.
Claiming that 64-bit Firefox is a "constant source of misunderstanding and frustration," the engineer wrote that the builds often crash, many plugins are not available in 64-bit versions, and hangs are more common due to a lack of coding which causes plugins to function incorrectly. In addition, Smedberg argues that this causes users to feel "second class," and crash reports between 32-bit and 64-bit versions are difficult to distinguish between for the stability team.
Users can still run 32-bit Firefox on 64-bit Windows.
Although originally willing to shelve the idea for a time if it proved controversial, Smedberg later, well, shelved that idea:
Thank you to everyone who participated in this thread. Given the existing information, I have decided to proceed with disabling windows 64-bit nightly and hourly builds. Please let us consider this discussion closed unless there is critical new information which needs to be presented.
The engineer then posted a thread titled "Disable windows 64 builds" on Bugzilla, asking developers to "stop building windows [sic] 64 builds and tests." These include the order to stop building Windows 64-bit nightly builds and repatriate existing Windows 64-bit nightly users onto Windows 32-bit builds using a custom update.
In order to stave off argument, even though one participant suggested that 50 percent of nightly testers were using the system, perhaps as an official 64-bit version of Firefox for Windows has never been released, Smedberg said it was "not the place to argue about this decision, which has already been made."
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Posts: 9094
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Well maybe they should just focus on one browser at a time instead of the many variations that they have. eg: Aurora, Waterfox etc.
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Joined: 2011-11-01
Waterfox is being developed independently, same source code, different development.
I think.
Posts: 9094
Joined: 2010-11-10
Ah, cool. My bad.
Senior Member
Posts: 16004
Joined: 2004-08-18
That is a bit lame really considering that 64-bit operating systems have been around for years now.
True, not that many games and applications are coded as 64-bit either but Internet Explorer and Opera are so it just highlights a weakness in Firefox IMO. Personally, I think the quality of Firefox itself has dropped somewhat since they switched to monthly release cycles. I now find more incompatibility issues and glitches than with any other browser, including Internet Explorer.
Posts: 2844
Joined: 2011-11-01
Well that's a kick in the nuts!
I wonder if this will include Waterfox.