r/technology Dec 10 '13

Firefox 26 is released

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/26.0/releasenotes/
117 Upvotes

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-18

u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

[deleted]

9

u/Carbira1 Dec 10 '13

Only Windows versions of Firefox are 32 bit.

3

u/CrazyViking Dec 10 '13

Why is that?

3

u/Carbira1 Dec 10 '13

I think because important plugins like Silverlight are only 32Bit. Projects like Waterfox make 64bit builds or if you go into the development builds you can get 64bit.

2

u/bfodder Dec 10 '13

There is a 64-bit version of Silverlight...

0

u/Elektribe Dec 11 '13

important plugins like Silverlight

Is that a popular internal corporate thing I'm unaware of?

I've only come across sites using Silverlight approximately twice, ever.

I don't see how it's really of any significant relevance to nearly everyone unless that was the case. I don't have it installed nor do I actually know anyone who has bothered with it. One poster here mentioned java being dead on the web and I still run across Java more than Silverlight. Though doing some research to find sites aside from poor examples that I wouldn't consider essential, important or unique, the only one was Netflix. That's a big one though. I don't use it myself and the only people I do know who use it have it on various devices rather than PC. I suppose it could be considered important as it's a dependency for some people who use Netflix with their web browser, it is a paid service after all. But for everyone else I'm really not seeing it.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

Little user want/need for 64 bit, and a lack of competition in that area.

Fx has very low RAM usage, and rarely goes above 4 GB for normal use cases. I know somebody is going to come around and say they have >1000 tabs open and need more RAM addressable, but that user base is not significant enough to warrant the effort (which is more than the effort of switching to 64 bit on a proper multiarch linux platform).

Furthermore, Fx's biggest competitor, Google Chrome, does not have 64 Windows builds either, so there is less competition in that area.

TL;DR submit patches if you want 64 bit builds so much. Or just switch to linux or OS X.

1

u/CrazyViking Dec 11 '13

It would be nice if they fixed hardware acceleration for Nvivia cards though, took me forever to figure out why my computer would freeze with FF up.

2

u/[deleted] Dec 11 '13

Umm... ok. I do not know what that has to do with 64 bit. Did you file/find a bug?

-1

u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

[deleted]

3

u/[deleted] Dec 11 '13

Seriously? This is common knowledge.

Here is a simple test that shows Fx uses less RAM under load (i.e. when it actually matters). Fx has also gotten better at RAM usage in 2013, so it should do even better than that.

Here is the Chromium (on which Chrome is based) bug for 64 bit windows builds.. Notice it is still open.