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Firefox 64-Bit Development for Windows Killed Off
Development of 64-bit Firefox for Windows is dead. As hard to believe in this 64-bit world, it seems that 32-bit apps still rule. On Friday, Mozilla engineering manager Benjamin Smedberg posted a thread over on the Google Groups mozilla.dev.planning forum called "Turning off win64 builds", due to various problems with them. After a somewhat lively discussion, he decided to pull all 64-bit development on Wednesday, meaning that a 64-bit version of Firefox will unfortunately never be relesed.
There were quite a few reasons for this, but the mains ones were, many plugins unavailable, the ones that are available don't work properly and tend to hang the browser, limited resources means 64-bit crashes are given lower priority and crash reports often didn't distinguish between 31-bit and 64-bit builds. Overall, 64-bit users ended up being second class citizens, due to these reasons and more, which Smedberg wasn't happy about. Note that OS X and and Linux both have release versions of 64-bit Firefox. The full thread is linked to below and Smedberg also posted a request to stop developing 64-bit Firefox over at Bugzilla.
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.
Posted by | Thu, Nov 22, 2012 - 01:46 PM
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