Last month, Mozilla decided to abandon the 64-bit version of Firefox for Windows. At the time, the engineering manager at Mozilla, Benjamin Smedberg said that these versions used to crash more often and were due to "frictions and frustrations" among developers. Now Mozilla has decided to go back: a 64-bit version of Firefox for Windows, which was never officially released, will continue to be developed.
The new decision was made by the Benjamin Smedberg. According to him, the Firefox power users often maintain tens or hundreds of tabs open, which causes a high memory consumption. In the 32-bit version, memory usage is limited to 4 GB, the 64-bit version, the limit is so high that it would not be a problem. The decision was the first post a screenshot of Firefox consuming nearly 10 GB of RAM:
This does not mean that the development of Firefox for Windows 64-bit will continue full steam ahead. The nightly builds will continue to be generated, but these compilations will have little attention from the development team. The variant will also have some changes: the feature that sends crash reports to Mozilla is disabled and configuration click-to-play will be enabled by default, to avoid a problematic plugin let the browser very unstable.
Who uses Firefox 64-bit Windows should be migrated to the 32-bit version via an automatic update to be released soon. If you wish to continue using the 64-bit version, you must install it manually. Another option is to install Waterfox, a fork of Firefox focused on speed.
Nothing changes over Linux and OS X, which already have stable versions of Firefox optimized for 64-bit processors.
The new decision was made by the Benjamin Smedberg. According to him, the Firefox power users often maintain tens or hundreds of tabs open, which causes a high memory consumption. In the 32-bit version, memory usage is limited to 4 GB, the 64-bit version, the limit is so high that it would not be a problem. The decision was the first post a screenshot of Firefox consuming nearly 10 GB of RAM:
This does not mean that the development of Firefox for Windows 64-bit will continue full steam ahead. The nightly builds will continue to be generated, but these compilations will have little attention from the development team. The variant will also have some changes: the feature that sends crash reports to Mozilla is disabled and configuration click-to-play will be enabled by default, to avoid a problematic plugin let the browser very unstable.
Who uses Firefox 64-bit Windows should be migrated to the 32-bit version via an automatic update to be released soon. If you wish to continue using the 64-bit version, you must install it manually. Another option is to install Waterfox, a fork of Firefox focused on speed.
Nothing changes over Linux and OS X, which already have stable versions of Firefox optimized for 64-bit processors.
