It saddens me to see that Mozilla decided to deprecate 64-bit builds of Firefox. That decision is even more puzzling considering that Firefox, unlike Google Chrome, still runs all tabs within a single process, making it even more likely to either hit the 4GB limit or leak memory due to memory fragmentation.
Personally, I too was running Firefox in 32-bit, though the comments to this news pointed me to a rebuild of Firefox called "Waterfox". Not only it targets 64-bit, but also is compiled with heavy optimizations using the Intel compiler. It is to note that JavaScript is slightly slower since the JIT compiler optimizations were heavily biased 32-bit architectures. Otherwise, Waterfox is significantly faster, and automatically reused all of my Firefox settings and extensions.
Now, the primary concern about why Firefox dropped 32-bit support is because 64-bit browser plugins tend to be less stable than 32-bit ones. Personally, I used the switch to Waterfox as an excuse to stop using all those plugins that made Firefox less stable in the first place. I find that moving extensions to external processes to be a major kludge, and quite frankly I just wish that within a few years they just disappear.
Published on November 23, 2012 at 21:39 EST
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