Mozilla Win64 Builds Are Axed

Discussion about Seamonkey builds
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therube
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Mozilla Win64 Builds Are Axed

Post by therube »

Mozilla Windows 64-bit Builds Are Axed.

Unbeknownst to me till just now.
And as far as I'm concerned, no big deal.
The only place I can see a benefit is if (mozilla) were using huge (>4 GB) RAM.
Seems that some do.
When I ramped up my active tab usage (different from when I start up, with tabs simply being partially loaded), I was able to get some HUGE memory usage numbers, & SeaMonkey did "work" (it was an x64 build), though it was FAR from usable.
And because Mozilla stopped its builds does not mean that others that do build Win x64 can't continue to do so.
Just that any "support" on the Mozilla side has ceased.
(I have long stated that 64-bit "ain't all that its cracked up to be". That goes for the <Windows> OS & applications that run on it.)

(One of many similar threads) Mozilla quietly kills Firefox 64-bit for Windows.

And mozilla.dev.apps.firefox › Turning off win64 builds.
Fire 750, bring back 250.
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TPR75
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Re: Mozilla Win64 Builds Are Axed

Post by TPR75 »

Mozilla: "We will not make 64-bit software because there are no 64-bit plugins for it."
Plugin developers: "How can we make 64-bit plugins for software that doesn't exists...?"

For me Mozilla's explanation is just plain stupid! ](*,)
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therube
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Re: Mozilla Win64 Builds Are Axed

Post by therube »

Not really, IMO.

Just what do you gain with a 64-bit version of Mozilla (other then the ability to use >4GB of RAM)?

Or a 64-bit version of ... Nirsoft's utilities, or MS's malware tool, or Flash, or Servant Salamander (it can access "correctly" particular Windows directory structures that you would have to otherwise access in a "hacked" manner, but then not all Salamander plugins work, & no Windows 32-bit context menu items display...) ...
Fire 750, bring back 250.
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James
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Re: Mozilla Win64 Builds Are Axed

Post by James »

The Win64 Nightly builds of Firefox are NOT being axed but rather just going on hiatus for now. Many articles including that henextweb.com example have been wrongly claiming they were stopped for good.
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Re: Mozilla Win64 Builds Are Axed

Post by patrickjdempsey »

therube wrote:Just that any "support" on the Mozilla side has ceased.


TMK Mozilla has never directly offered any *support* at all other than doing the build. Due to this lack of support, 64-bit builds were accruing 64-bit-specific bugs that were not being fixed, and which 3rd-party builders are likely not fixing either.
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Re: Mozilla Win64 Builds Are Axed

Post by vazhavandan »

Linux(at least openSUSE) users do get 64 bit builds for both Firefox and SeaMonkey. :mrgreen: =D> :D
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Re: Mozilla Win64 Builds Are Axed

Post by rsx11m »

There must be some Windows-specific reason that 64-bit builds seem to pose a greater challenge than on the other platforms. On Linux, all 64-bit versions (either from my distro's repository, from mozilla.org, or which I've built from scratch off Mercurial) worked fine for me. Also, there have been 64-bit Linux test boxes around for a while, so it seems to be fairly well covered.

A motivation to provide those on Linux is that you have to keep separate set of libraries for 32-bit builds, and not all distros install those by default. Thus, using native 64-bit builds allows you to avoid the overhead of carrying (and keeping maintained) additional 32-bit copies of those libraries around. Windows on the other hand has the generic WOW64 intermediate layer, which seems to satisfy everything needed, and 32-bit only installations are much more common than on Linux or Mac OSX.
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Re: Mozilla Win64 Builds Are Axed

Post by vazhavandan »

well 32 bit browser do occupy 1gb ram on 64 bit windows which is unacceptable
Virtual machine for running browsers is abuse of hw resource
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Re: Mozilla Win64 Builds Are Axed

Post by patrickjdempsey »

rsx11m wrote:There must be some Windows-specific reason that 64-bit builds seem to pose a greater challenge than on the other platforms.


Ding ding ding.
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Re: Mozilla Win64 Builds Are Axed

Post by James »

vazhavandan wrote:Linux(at least openSUSE) users do get 64 bit builds for both Firefox and SeaMonkey. :mrgreen: =D> :D

Mozilla provides both 32-bit and 64-bit builds of Firefox for Linux users also. They just do not make the 64-bit Linux builds of Firefox as visible. Mac users get both 32 and 64 in download.

http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/17.0.1/linux-x86_64/
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Re: Mozilla Win64 Builds Are Axed

Post by rsx11m »

vazhavandan wrote:well 32 bit browser do occupy 1gb ram on 64 bit windows which is unacceptable

That's not normal. This instance of 32-bit SeaMonkey 2.18 (as fished out of the tinderbox) on 64-bit Windows 7 currently uses a it less than 120MB, though hasn't run any plug-ins or lots of tabs opened yet (but a long way to a 1GB bloat).
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Re: Mozilla Win64 Builds Are Axed

Post by therube »

well 32 bit browser do occupy 1gb ram on 64 bit windows which is unacceptable

Not sure what you mean by that?
My 32-bit SeaMonkey uses "what it needs" on Win7 x64.
Typically, in my case, that is ~1 GB RAM, but that is only due to the number of windows/tabs I have open.
Otherwise, it would be as expected, nothing unexpected.
Fire 750, bring back 250.
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Re: Mozilla Win64 Builds Are Axed

Post by rsx11m »

In general, a 32-bit build on a 64-bit Windows machine needs a bit more memory that on a 32-bit Windows given that the WOW64 layer introduces some overhead (don't know how much and if it's reflected in the Task Manager, but that should be shared library code anyway). On the other hand, a native 64-bit build on a 64-bit machine needs more memory as all pointers are 64-bit rather than 32-bit wide, consequently doubling the memory requirements for such pointers themselves. Thus, there are trade-offs either way.
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Re: Mozilla Win64 Builds Are Axed

Post by vazhavandan »

64 bit applications are native to 64 bit OS . Hence they perform much better than comparable 32 bit app.
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therube
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Re: Mozilla Win64 Builds Are Axed

Post by therube »

Fire 750, bring back 250.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.19) Gecko/20110420 SeaMonkey/2.0.14 Pinball CopyURL+ FetchTextURL FlashGot NoScript
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