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Firefox Developer Edition 38: 64-bits and more

184 points| gulbrandr | 11 years ago |hacks.mozilla.org | reply

61 comments

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[+] thristian|11 years ago|reply
From the changelog:

> autocomplete=off is no longer supported for username/password fields

As far as I can recall, autocomplete=off was originally added specifically for username and password fields, so somebody who nicked your laptop couldn't go to your bank's website and have your username and password filled in.

As a power user I find autocomplete=off pretty annoying, but I've got ways to work around it. I'm very curious what the rationale for this change is.

[+] Apofis|11 years ago|reply
Lastpass saves me hours every week with their Auto Login and Form Fill features. If they are to be believed, all your stuff is encrypted on their servers. If you lose your master password, your screwed, so I don't think someone like the NSA or a hacker can get access to my login data.

The only way you can recover a lastpass account is if you do it from a computer that was already authenticated with lastpass in the near past.

[+] leeoniya|11 years ago|reply
for backend admin, when creating usernames and passwords for new users, you dont want those saved in your own browser.

pretty much the only use-case i've run into and can think of.

[+] nnethercote|11 years ago|reply
64-bit Windows builds, finally! This is great news. The rate of (virtual) OOM crashes on Windows is pretty high because a 32-bit address space just isn't enough for many workloads these days, and 64-bit builds solves that problem definitely.
[+] nextw33k|11 years ago|reply
What? You are using more than 3.5GB of memory for your browser? I consider myself a heavy user with 20-30 tabs open at any one time. I used to have a 2GB memory usage with Adblock Plus and since switching to uBlock it averages 0.6GB of RAM.

64bit will open more address space but it has proven in the past to slow the browser down, the wider memory pointer size has a detrimental effect, Waterfox is Firefox recompiled as 64bit and other compiler optimisations: http://www.networkworld.com/article/2185649/applications/fas...

Not everything should be 64bit.

[+] Sami_Lehtinen|11 years ago|reply
I've been using 64bit version since 2006 on Linux. But if I don't remember wrong IE has been available as 64 bit version much longer. Xp 64 and 2003 Server used to use 64 bit IE6.
[+] bhouston|11 years ago|reply
This is much needed for us at http://Clara.io. We have for the last 8 months been detecting when users who are using 32 bit desktop browsers and have been putting up in-app warnings directing people to upgrade to 64 bit versions.

Our forum post about the issue:

http://forum.clara.io/t/information-on-64-bit-web-browsers/9...

[+] voltagex_|11 years ago|reply
Do you have any stats on people who went away and installed a 64 bit browser? clara.io's audience would be highly technical but I don't think you'd get away with asking many people to install a new browser these days.
[+] angersock|11 years ago|reply
Nifty, but unfortunately we're still kinda limited to 32-bit addressing in typed arrays. It'd be nice if JS had an actual integer type that went up to 64 bits.
[+] tjgq|11 years ago|reply
I'm not sure what the typed array limitations are, but Javascript numbers are able to exactly represent integers up to 2^53 - 1, which is quite a bit more than 32 bits.
[+] thomasfoster96|11 years ago|reply
I think 64 bit integers in Typed Arrays are harder to implement than the other typed arrays already in Javascript. The highest integer you can safely work with in Javascript is 32 bits (using the ( number | 0 ) trick ) and so I wouldn't think it's just a coincidence that there isn't 64 bit integer arrays.

I hold out hope for ES7 or ES8 to have them though - especially when SIMD.js comes about.

[+] azakai|11 years ago|reply
32-bit is enough for a 4GB typed array, which doesn't seem too bad. I imagine eventually it will be limiting, but not in the near future.
[+] greenyoda|11 years ago|reply
64-bit Windows builds of Firefox have been available for quite a while from the Waterfox Project:

https://www.waterfoxproject.org

[+] JohnTHaller|11 years ago|reply
These are the first official Firefox builds from Mozilla other than Nightlies. Before this, Mozilla didn't feel the 64-bit code was stable enough. Waterfox took the existing code and compiled it for 64-bit, but all the existing issues and bugs were present.
[+] getsat|11 years ago|reply
Holy crap, this is so much faster than Firefox. Lifesaver. Thanks!
[+] mikko-apo|11 years ago|reply
Chrome displays if the browser is 64bit in its about box, but for Firefox that information is a bit harder to find out.

It's in about:buildconfig

[+] wluu|11 years ago|reply
From the comments, if you've got the 32bit version installed and want to install the 64bit version (basically, it's not an update from one to the other):

– Uninstall Win32 – Don’t remove your profile – Install Win64 (it’s a full installer vs. a update)

[+] ilaksh|11 years ago|reply
I just want a browser that runs on Android with developer tools built in.
[+] geeknik|11 years ago|reply
Been using 64 bit Nightly builds (from Mozilla) for years. Not sure why this is news.
[+] dblohm7|11 years ago|reply
Win64 builds have not been available in channels beyond Nightly until now. That's why it is news.
[+] andor|11 years ago|reply
If you haven’t downloaded the Developer Edition browser yet, it’s a fine time to give it a try. Here’s why:

Aha, so where can I try that Unreal Engine 4 demo myself?

[+] ChuckMcM|11 years ago|reply
Wow, that is pretty cool. At what point is a browser indistinguishable from an emulated virtual computer?
[+] sliverstorm|11 years ago|reply
I'm still rather incredulous about the whole idea. I think to myself, if this is the best way to do things, we must be missing something.

Though, I can't put my finger on why JVM seems reasonable while BrowserVM doesn't.

[+] interknot|11 years ago|reply
That's a pretty interesting way to think of it. The only other platforms (AFAIK) that come close would be the JVM and Mono/CLR.

But the browser is more like a user-facing, interactive JVM/etc.

[+] zobzu|11 years ago|reply
Sounds like FirefoxOS.
[+] frozenport|11 years ago|reply
When you can run assembly on it, unless of course you are emulating a computer without assembly...
[+] yuhong|11 years ago|reply
BTW, fixing open source JITs to support Windows x64 SEH properly is on my wishlist for MS Open Tech.
[+] frozenport|11 years ago|reply
Was Firefox for Linux x64?
[+] cesarb|11 years ago|reply
Firefox has been available both as 32-bit and 64-bit on Linux for a long time.

Quoting myself (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8629233):

----

From what I have read, for software which wasn't originally developed for Windows, especially if the code base is old enough, porting to 64-bit is harder on Windows than on other systems.

The problem is that, while the Unix-based world went the LP64 way (int is 32-bit, long and pointers are 64-bit), Windows went the LLP64 way (int and long are 32-bit, pointers are 64-bit). A lot of Unix programmers tended to behave as if "long" was the largest native type ("long long" on 32-bit uses a pair of registers). They have to scrub their whole code base for things like assuming an object's size or array index will always fit on a "long".

----

For Firefox, there's the additional problem of plugins. For a long time, plugins on Windows have been 32-bit, and also for a long time, plugins for Firefox on Windows (and other operating systems) were in-process, so it wasn't possible to use a 32-bit plugin with a 64-bit browser.

Nowadays, not only can Firefox use a separate process for plugins, but also the whole idea of browser plugins seems to be dying, so it's less of a problem.

[+] en4bz|11 years ago|reply
Seems to be 64 bit on Ubuntu 14.10

$ readelf -h /usr/lib/firefox/firefox

ELF Header:

  Magic:   7f 45 4c 46 02 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 

  Class:                             ELF64

  Data:                              2's complement, little
endian

  Version:                           1 (current)

  OS/ABI:                            UNIX - System V

  ABI Version:                       0

  Type:                              DYN (Shared object
file)

  Machine:                           Advanced Micro Devices X86-64
[+] shmerl|11 years ago|reply
I use it for years on Linux already. I didn't even know on Windows Firefox wasn't 64 bit yet.
[+] Animats|11 years ago|reply
Now, there's no limit to how much memory the browser can consume.

I hope this doesn't turn into a license to bloat.