64-bit Firefox is the New Default on 64-bit Windows (mozilla.org) 178
An anonymous reader shares a blog post: Users on 64-bit Windows who download Firefox will now get our 64-bit version by default. That means they'll install a more secure version of Firefox, one that also crashes a whole lot less. How much less? In our tests so far, 64-bit Firefox reduced crashes by 39% on machines with 4GB of RAM or more.
About time! (Score:1, Interesting)
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There is more to it than that. Firefox isn't exactly a simple application, and configuration management isn't exactly a simple topic.
Generally, when you make a major shift, such as supporting new functionality, or a new platform etc, there has to be a good reason. I don't think that the majority of people running a 64bit OS is a good enough reason, when the OS supports the 32bit version of the software.
Before I invite a whole bunch of flame, think about your typical long standing software. Something that
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Strangely, the sales people never made a big thing of 64-bit. Every other advance, like processor speed, was a reason, according to the sales hype, to toss your previous PC and buy a new one. But there was scarcely a whisper about 64-bit.
When I was buying a new motherboard and processor around 2008 it was even quite difficult to work out from the advertising whether they were 64-bit or not. It was like some conspiracy to keep it quiet. Was that because Microsoft were so slow at catching up with 64-bit t
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64 bit put Intel in the embarrassing position of having to catch up with AMD. Microsoft laid down the law and said they would not support an incompatible set of x86_64 extensions so Intel had to make their products AMD-compatible. That cost Intel a lot of legal leverage because they were forced to license a key technology from AMD.
Intel's first generation of support for x86_64 in the Pentium 4 and Pentium D was poorly implemented. AMD processors typically saw a 10-20% speedup if you switched to the 64 bit
Re: About time! (Score:2, Informative)
64 bit Windows still has the 32 bit bits in it. So, 32 bit will still run. 64 bit Linux usually only has the 64 bit bits within it, as default. So, of course Linux went default 64 bit first. It was easier.
Re:About time! (Score:5, Informative)
Also when people had 4GB RAM max on their computers there was no advantage of a 64bit OS. The 64-bit applications are larger and they are not faster. If the 32-bit version of Firefox crashes more then it's because they aren't spending as much time maintaining it.
Re:About time! (Score:5, Interesting)
In my experience Firefox crashes because the memory leaks cause it to reach the 2GB per-32 bit process memory barrier, then it crashes. Now commit charge can grow to 8TB before crashing!
Re:About time! (Score:5, Informative)
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Nope. 64-bit applications are faster and more secure.
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This sounds like marketing. What particular features of 64 bit applications make them "more secure"?
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...Flash, perhaps?
He'll save every one of us!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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This [reddit.com] Redditer estimates that half of all Windows 7 users (that is, half of 48.5% of 2 billion = some 485 million) are running 32 bit.
tl;dr? One-third of all computer users...some 650M people...are still using 32 bit.
* Windows XP is still the third most popular operating system in the world (as of May, 2017) [businessinsider.com]
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Who runs 32 bit...in 2017? How about (at least) the 140,000,000 people still running Windows XP*.
Windows XP was available in 64-bit
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Read the GP's post again.
This statement is miles out of whack. One-third of all computer users in the world are running 32 bit Windows. TODAY.
Firefox (and Chrome) choosing to not support XP doesn't make XP go away. It makes their decisions look ostrich-like.
XP and Vista are as unsupported as white males these days.
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Continuing to support XP has some costs beyond just having to test on another OS. It means that they can't move to a newer version of Visual Studio, which is probably the tool that they use to develop and build their software, and that means they don't get the benefit of improvements in the newer version. Eventually they would reach the point when no supported version of VS is capable of producing code that will run on XP; that has not yet fully happened, although versions of VS later than 2012 have debuggi
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Re:About time! (Score:5, Funny)
They were concentrating on removing the useful features, randomizing UI and adding new social media and video chat buttons. Having a stable and optimized binary was never a priority on Mozilla's business plan.
Mozilla Foundation pressured by Microsoft? (Score:4, Interesting)
One small but indicative example: On the Mozilla Foundation Download Firefox in your language [mozilla.org] web page the 32-bit and 64-bit versions have the same file name!
The browser situation is very, very ugly. Firefox is now, basically, owned by Microsoft, who is apparently trying to destroy it. In the past, Google paid Mozilla Foundation $300 million each year [allthingsd.com] (December 22, 2011) to make Google search the default search engine in Firefox. Google apparently didn't cause problems in the design of Firefox, even though it paid a shocking amount.
Now, I understand, Mozilla Foundation gets most of its money from Microsoft: Microsoft pays Yahoo. Yahoo pays Mozilla Foundation to make "Yahoo search" (actually mostly Microsoft Bing search) [searchengineland.com] (April 16, 2015) the default search engine in Firefox.
The Thunderbird and SeaMonkey Composer GUIs have been damaged, apparently deliberately. File saves in the newer versions of both ask for a new file name, and don't suggest the last one chosen. The damage was reported several months ago, but has not been fixed.
Is that another example of Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Extinguish? People who feel forced away from Thunderbird may choose Microsoft software to replace it. Is that something Microsoft is trying to accomplish?
In my opinion, dishonest people should not be employed in management. In my opinion, the managers and members of the board of directors of both Microsoft and Mozilla Foundation who approved the dishonesty of sneakily re-configuring Mozilla Foundation products should be immediately fired, and not allowed to have management positions in the future.
Mozilla Foundation may be desperate now that it has lost the incredible amount of money paid by Google.
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We are seeing technology companies that are shockingly badly managed.
So do it better. If you know how to do it better then take the opportunity that's apparently available to you and profit from it. We'll all benefit from, and be dazzled and amazed by, your insight and leadership, won't we?
Or is it easier to talk and harder to actually do?
My comment is analysis, not just talk. (Score:2)
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Try downloading from the link I gave in GP post. (Score:2)
Not the same file:
37,083,648 Firefox Setup 55.0.1_64-bits.exe
34,050,760 Firefox Setup 55.0.1_32-bits.exe
Mistake fixed: (Score:2)
37,083,648 Firefox Setup 55.0.1.exe (64-bit version)
34,050,760 Firefox Setup 55.0.1.exe (32-bit version)
I added "_64-bits" and "_32-bits" to the file names when I saved the files. We support some 32-bit computers so we need both.
Mozilla Foundation should use file names that indicate the difference.
Re:About time! (Score:4, Funny)
With 32-bit Firefox, there was a sane upper limit on how much memory the program could use with a 32-bit address space. With a 64-bit Firefox, there is no sane upper limit on memory that Firefox can consume. Think Godzilla or other giant monsters tearing through a modern city meme.
Mozilla was protecting us all!
Firefox could now consume as much memory as . . .
. . . as . . . as . . . Java 64-bit with -Xms=64000m -Xmx=128000m
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A benefit. The 32-bit version may perform better.
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Way more, there were 64bit OS's in the mid 90s...
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Firefox 64-bit Works Every Time (Score:1)
61% of the time, Firefox 64-bit works every time!
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The "39% less" is telling in itself. You can't get to a "39% less" without multiple and quite a few crashes. If it had been a number like 50%, it could be attributed to a small sample size, but 0.39 isn't close to any small divisor.
So they're telling us that it still crashes quite a bit.
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The "39% less" is telling in itself. You can't get to a "39% less" without multiple and quite a few crashes. If it had been a number like 50%, it could be attributed to a small sample size, but 0.39 isn't close to any small divisor.
So they're telling us that it still crashes quite a bit.
Additionally, I find it odd they would make a statement like that and specify it with a classifier, "... with 4GB of RAM or more." So, what is it? Is it that it's 64-bit, or it is that it can address more memory than the 32-bit max of 4GB of memory.... or is it how the memory is paged in the 64-bit win kernel vs how it's handled in the 32-bit ones.... or....?
Adding an "and" to a statement like that pretty much tears it apart because there are multiple paths to data points for the statement after an "and".
Re:Firefox 64-bit Works Every Time (Score:5, Insightful)
What's really needed is a version of Firefox that doesn't use so much fucking memory that we need a 64-bit version.
With two slashdot tabs open my Firefox is current using 700Mb of memory.
Yes, I just restarted it. Before the restart it was 1.5Gb for those same two pages.
I installed the 64-bit version a few months ago when the 32-bit version finally became completely unusable for basic web browsing.
PS: Google Chrome is better, but not much - 500Mb. IE can do it in a "mere" 200Mb. WTF happened to 'coding'?
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IE can do it in a "mere" 200Mb.
No, it can't. It can't even do it in 200MB. The numbers you're seeing are lies. A significant part of "IE" gets baked into "Windows", as to hide it's real numbers. So, in reality, Windows doesn't use as much RAM as you're told, and you get tricked into thinking IE is way more efficient than it is in reality compared to its competition.
There used to be tools to strip out all of IE out of Windows which would render it quite a bit lighter. However, I have to admit I haven't kept up to date on those, so I can't
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What's really needed is a version of Firefox that doesn't use so much fucking memory that we need a 64-bit version.
x86-64 is about much more than the address space.
PS: Google Chrome is better, but not much - 500Mb. IE can do it in a "mere" 200Mb. WTF happened to 'coding'?
Being only for Windows, I imagine IE makes more use of the OS libraries. Firefox and Chrome are available on multiple OSes, so they need to include a lot of cross-platform libraries.
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What's really needed is a version of Firefox that doesn't use so much fucking memory that we need a 64-bit version.
x86-64 is about much more than the address space.
Please enlighten us. Ignorant mortals might think they're compiling the exact same code.
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x86-64 is about much more than the address space.
Please enlighten us. Ignorant mortals might think they're compiling the exact same code.
More and larger registers. SSE1/2 instructions guaranteed, these are optional in x86. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
There's even a Linux project called x32 to make use of these features, while limiting the address space to 32 bits per process for potential speedups. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Your mileage may vary (Score:3)
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I have adblock, noscript, one to restart firefox, and ... not much else.
Re:Your mileage may vary (Score:4, Funny)
If I remember correctly, Adblock itself consumes quite a lot of memory. You might consider trying uBlock Origin. It uses much less.
Hush or you'll summon APK.
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What's really needed is a version of Firefox that doesn't use so much fucking memory that we need a 64-bit version.
It's not their fault. It's mine.
I take efficient streamlined console applications and rewrite them into bloated quirky slow web applications with 100% Javascript front ends.
I crush your tiny browser.
Actually, it's not my fault. That's just what my clients ask for.
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Who cares? I have 16GB of RAM, even running 2 games and my web browser I don't start paging. As long as it makes things faster please for the love of god use my RAM.
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What add-ons do you have installed? Insane memory usage like that is usually due to broke add-ons.
For comparison I fired up an instance with only uBlock and 14 Slashdot tabs and it's using 330MB.
64-bit uses much more RAM too (Score:3)
The 64-bit version also easily uses 1.5 times as much memory for the same set of pages as the 32-bit version. Frankly, I'd rather just stick with 32-bit: I'm running other applications as well that I like to see remain responsive, and not have all of my RAM gobbled up by a browser.
Maybe it will crash much less. I wouldn't be able to tell; Firefox hasn't crashed for me in years and years.
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Security is not always the highest priority. The system must also remain useful for normal use, and I'll happily trade off some theoretical improved security against very measurable lost performance. I'd rather use that extra 400MB or so for disk cache; I certainly need it while compiling, something I do a lot over the day.
And given the number of problems I've had over the years (zero, as reported by both my permanent virusscanner and the occasional run with things like Hitman Pro), I'd say that security is
Re:Firefox 64-bit Works Every Time (Score:5, Interesting)
Hate to be the "it works for me guy" but Firefox's memory footprint has dropped continuously and is widely recognised as being much smaller than Chrome's to the point where Google started removing the tools needed to analyse memory use as it was constantly being used against them.
If Firefox is using more memory than Chrome you are doing something very wrong with your plugins or profile. If Firefox is using 700MB for 2 slashdot tabs, you're doing something very wrong with your plugins or profile.
Maybe you should nuke the entire thing and install fresh.
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Firefox does some stupid stuff at the code level, such as reserving 10% of your physical memory whether it needs it or not. If you have a lot of RAM installed in your system, Firefox will allocate more memory. Hence, it's not unusual to see instances of Firefox using almost 4GB of memory (regardless of what it's doing) if you're running on a high-end machine.
I've been trying to track down why PaleMoon v26 releases memory while PaleMoon v27 (and every version of Firefox I've used for the last decade) alway
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There's still Opera who have not gone that way.
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Sometimes the Firefox fanatics will trot out a nonsensical, unrealistic benchmark showing Firefox having a slight edge. Yet these benchmark results are totally inaccurate and cannot be reproduced under normal, everyday browsing scenarios.
10% better than "completely unacceptable" is nothing to brag about.
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To put it simply, we're all more willing to throw money at hardware or services than to throw money at tightening up existing programming.
Who's "we"?
I've got 16Gb myself so I'm not too worried. I'm just surprised that I was forced to update to 64-bit version a few months ago because I could no longer open a couple of web pages on the 32-bit version.
OTOH I know a lot of people who won't be able to use Firefox for much longer and aren't planning to buy a new laptop anytime soon. Firefox developers may disagree but 4Gb should be plenty for basic web + email IMHO.
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Memory is useful. Using memory can make your app more useful. The amount of memory used under low-pressure is meaningless. More important is how the app deals with memory pressure. Are they filling memory with shit that can be swapped out without much performance loss (like background tabs)? Or are they filling it with over-complicated and bloated program state? Web pages are hyper-interactive, hyper-rich, highly abstracted applications. Browsers are platforms meant to deal with that sort of workload. Memory is one of many resources that can be brought to bear on that problem.
A couple of months ago I was forced to switch to 64-bit because opening a few tabs while watching Youtube was no longer possible in 32-bits.
Crashing (Score:1)
>How much less? In our tests so far, 64-bit Firefox reduced crashes by 39% on machines with 4GB of RAM or more.
What was it crashing from? OOM?
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What was it crashing from? OOM?
If so, I would recommend sticking with 32-bit Firefox. Then the browser may crash, but at least it won't eat up more than the 32-bit address space and cause problems for other tasks running on your system.
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I think your phrasing is off.. it can't quite eat up more than the 32 bit address space.
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I think your phrasing is off.. it can't quite eat up more than the 32 bit address space.
PAE with swappin' or non-PAE with a lower defined mathematical limit? The statement is vague (not yours, the parent).
About those "crashes"... (Score:5, Insightful)
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You have it easy. Me, every time I open one single tab my house explodes. I'm getting tired to move every day. It's also a real pain to have to update my home address on websites when that forces me move again.
Finally! (Score:3)
Great news for the 5% of us that still use Firefox. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
(Am a Firefox user, but am thinking about moving over to Chrome in the next few weeks).
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32bit Chrome in 64bit Android (Score:2)
Maybe also Google will follow!
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I haven't encountered that since I finally decided to upgrade to the 64-bit build; that bug was so annoying I decided the older plugins didn't matter. :)
Why is it crashing less though? (Score:2)
Would be nice to know. Probably a combination of all of the above but I assume Mozilla has metrics to say where the added stability comes from.
Already Failed. (Score:2)
After many years of Netscape, Mozilla and Firefox, this year was the last nail in the coffin for me. At some update Firefox simply would run for some time (maybe a couple of minutes, mas a few hours) and silently drop any network access. I was already disappointed with many and frequent crashes, lot of websites that didn't work and so on... but really it got to an all-time low on quality and usability.
And it's on my work machine, where I don't go to anywhere "strange"...
How about upgrades/updates? (Score:3)
Re:How about upgrades/updates? (Score:4, Informative)
All my windows machines have 64-bit Windows installed, but I have already installed the 32-bit version of Firefox on them (because that was the default at the time). How about automatically UPGRADING my 32-bit Firefox to 64-bit on machines that can handle it?
This is scheduled for the next release, Firefox 56.
The Browser Trend. (Score:2)
We get a shiny new and slim browser we love it, we ask for more features, these features get added, the browser gets bloated, We get an other shiny and slim browser...
Netscape by 4.5 became Netscape Communicator with email newsgroups and a bunch of other stuff, took minutes to load up.
Internet Explorer was seen as a better options. Integrated into the OS, means it took a lot less time to boot up, and followed the standards a bit better so pages rendered better. Then by Version 6. It hasn't kept up with th
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Right... (Score:2)
So they didn't fixed the crashing - they postponed it by throwing hardware into the problem.
Kudos, moz://a . On the Microsoft way. If at least you had the money to buy your way out, uh?
lol (Score:2)
Memory leaks? (Score:3)
I've been using the 64-bit version of Firefox on my desktop PC for about a month.
The memory use of the application is regularly blowing up. Last week after leaving the PC and Firefox open for the day while I was at work, I came back home only to find out my computer crawling and Firefox process taking 10GB of memory. That's up from about 800MB at startup.
The memory reports aren't working either, so I can't figure out what's going on easily.
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I recognize that this post will be unpopular, but:
Both of those numbers are stupidly-large.
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That's up from about 800MB at startup. The memory reports aren't working either,
Hate to say it, but something is very screwed on your install. Maybe it's time to start fresh. If you're using around 500MB with 30+ tabs open, then you're back in business.
Need to do it quickly! (Score:5, Interesting)
Since FF 57 will be the death of Firefox in about three months due to the disabling of all "legacy" extensions (which is 100% of the extensions I use - some very useful ones that haven't been updated in quite some time and that I can't find WebExtensions equivalents for), Mozilla needs to get done whatever they expect to be adopted before then -- and defaulting to 64-bit seems to fall in this category. (FF 55 already broke two of my favorite extensions -- I can run either one of them without the other, but not both at the same time because attempts to close new windows/popups or even FF itself are completely ignored so I may go back to 54).
Some users will, without realizing it, upgrade to 57 and discover that the primary reason they use FF has vaporized and then move on to Chrome. Some, like myself, will probably stick around on 54...56 for a while but will begin to switch to alternatives because they want security related browser updates.
It's amazing to me that if one goes to the FF addon's page and types in some search terms like "video" or "mouse" or "screen" or "download" or "tab" and sorts by 'most users', perhaps 10% of the extensions are tagged as compatible with 57+. I wonder who Mozilla expects to use FF after November -- do they have some big marketing initiative planned to attract a bunch of new users -- perhaps there is an untapped market of extra-terrestrials that are just discovering the World Wide Web I'm not aware of?
(Although, I must admit, upgrading to 64bit FF was a good thing for me -- instead of having to restart FF once or twice a day, now I can just restart it once or twice a week -- when it gets to about 13 GB of virtual memory, it gets pretty slow even though I've got lots of free memory on my 32GB desktop).
FF - R.I.P. - I'll miss you, it was fun back when FF was fresh and innovative but, sorry, now it's an old toothless 97 year old hag which is about to break both hips in a dementia and alcohol induced suicide attempt jumping off a third floor balcony at the retirement home. It will be deadly, but it will be an unnecessarily painful and slow death. Come on, why not just announce that 56 is the last full release and that a few dedicated volunteers are going to try to issue patch releases on 56 for the most serious of security issues for a while?
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Valid questions and thanks for your reasoned response...
I used to have many add-ons installed. When upgrading to 64-bit FF (51) some months ago, I pruned the list down to those that I really use a lot (I started with none and then put them back as I missed them). I've not done a deep search for a 57+ compatible version for all of them -- I, frankly, gave up after trying to find replacements for perhaps three. I regularly use(d):
Adblock Plus
Copy Plain Text 2
DownThemAll!
Map This - unfortunately not compatible
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I've not tried Palemoon but thanks for reminding me of it as I look for alternatives to FF.
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Don't know about yours addons specifically. But I've used various Tab add-ons, I found them all heavier on resources.
I've keep 100's of tabs open and most restarts where from updating.
Only addons I'm using are ublock origin, noscript, saved password editor, session manager.
Now I will say on linux FF can't handle nearly as many tabs on windows. A few years ago I ran tests where even a VM runnign windows under with less RAM could handle more Tabs.
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I'm not the above poster, but I do know some situations where it's going to get in the way of some people's work. There have been a rash of presentation tools over the last few years that have been used to produce training materials in a lot of places (against all sane advice) and now all those things produced by abandonware are not going to work in people's web browsers.
WTF? (Score:2)
How can this seriously still be a thing in 2017? I don't get it. What the hell is wrong with Windows users that they have accepted anything less for SO LONG? If your OS can't keep up with technology from 14 BLOODY YEARS AGO, get a better OS!
There is absolutely no excuse for this. It just makes me despise Windows users that much more for being complete idiots—at least the technically-minded ones who know better.
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I've been using 32 version and it's crashed maybe a couple times a year. I think their marketing team is incompetent.
Marketing or testing or...? I use Firefox 32 and it crashes once or twice a year, but I don't "surf" and go all Facebook-happy. I only have a certain set of pages I go to, and branch out a bit in Wikipedia... Therefore my data is uncommon to "normal" usage given the age groups and social preferences of Humans, in the USA, in my age group, with my background of life events, with my personality..... it goes on and on. That's so freaking stupid to make a statement of. If they gave more details on the "pe
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Re: AWESOME fpi!! (Score:2)
Exactly what I was thinking of!
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Why the hell does a web browser require more than 4GB to run in a stable manner ? :-(
In an unstable manner. That it's reduced to 39% fewer crashes means that it still must crash quite a lot.
As for memory usage, I have three browsers running right now:
/proc/$(pgrep $b)/status; done
$ for b in firefox palemoon Mosaic; do printf "%s: " $b;grep VmPeak
firefox: VmPeak: 3310088 kB
palemoon: VmPeak: 1602116 kB
Mosaic: VmPeak: 61820 kB
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39% fewer crashes doesn't mean it crashes a lot.
If it crashes 1% of the time.
with the fewer crashes it would crash 0.71% of the time.
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with the fewer crashes it would crash 0.71% of the time.
Number of crashes are integers. There's no such thing as 0.71 crashed, so you'd have to measure a whole lot of crashes to arrive at that ratio. That's not reassuring.
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It is also about addressing memory past the 4 gigs mark. Handling big numbers faster 4 billion isn't that big of an integer anymore. Of course there is all that buffering and dealing with poorly written web pages.
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Well written software doesn't crash.
If it crashes, then it is a problem that needs to be addressed, and if you are going to address it, you should check to make sure the fix is more thorough.
If the software crashes, then there is a security risk. Because a crash is when something is happening that isn't expected, and that allows the hacker to take advantage of this.
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FF55 prevents the running of local flash files which is a non starter for me.
Very much this.
Not sure which browser I'll end up with, but it will not be FF55.
Strat
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Only available for proprietary operating systems. Git repository has NO tags, branches, or releases. It makes me think this developer doesn't know what the fuck he's doing. I would certainly not recommend this to anyone, ever.