Mozilla Dropping 64-Bit Windows Nightly Builds For Now 224
hypnosec writes "Plans for 64-bit Firefox for Windows have been put on hold by Mozilla in a bid to concentrate more on the 32-bit version. Eliminating the 64-bit nightly builds was proposed by Benjamin Smedberg, a Firefox developer, last week. Some of the reasons Smedberg cited include missing plugins for 64-bit version; lack of windowproc hooking which facilitates smooth functioning of whatever plugins are available; and the inability to work on the crash reports submitted for the 64-bit versions because they were not on high priority. The proposal, it seems, has been accepted as is evident from this bug report."
The bug tracking system seems unable to differentiate between 64-bit and 32-bit builds, causing a few issues since Windows 64-bit builds are much buggier. They also intend to reintroduce 64-bit Windows nightlies some time next year.
Dear Computer Programmers: Why do this? (Score:5, Interesting)
I am not a programmer, I'm just a systems guy. I mainly use Mac and Linux, and 64-bit is something I've Just Done for some time now since the introduction of EM64T, however the few times I need to mess with windows the way it works with 64-bit just baffles me as to how 'hard' it seems to be and how 'little' 64-bit friendly / 64-bit stuff there is.
Why is that?
Re:Dear Computer Programmers: Why do this? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's 'hard' only because it's a huge - yes really - number of lines of code. Gigantonormous numbers.
Pointers are the main reason why software don't port between 32 and 64 bit easily. It was the same in the transitions from 8 to 16 and 16 to 32. The power of C is being close to the hardware, with less overhead. The curse of C is being close to the hardware, being harder to move to new 64-bit hardware. This is a known trade-off and it's worth it. People who don't believe it write hardware independent Java code etc, and as observed, their software usually don't provide all the desired features, hence people stick with the software written in languages closer to the hardware.
Re:Bonus: (Score:0, Interesting)
Never seen vanilla FF go above 500M or so, even after several days of operation. With shitty plugins that do poor memory management, sure, it will go up into the 1G-2G range... stop using shitty plugins.
For the record, my IE session, right now, with three tabs open, is consuming 1.2G.