Weekly Edition
Return to the Development page
| |||||||||||||
Firefox 11 and Thunderbird 11 released
The Firefox 11 and Thunderbird 11 releases are out. They contain the usual
pile of fixes to scary security-related bugs and a number of new features.
New
goodies in Firefox include the ability to import information from
Google Chrome, synchronization of add-ons, CSS improvements, a CSS style
editor, Mozilla Tilt, and more. The
list of Thunderbird improvements is shorter but includes a new user
interface with tabs placed above the main menu.
(Log in to post comments)
Firefox 11 and Thunderbird 11 released Posted Mar 15, 2012 15:45 UTC (Thu) by theophrastus (guest, #80847) [Link]
Why are there no 64bit versions obviously available? I've found 64bit -nightlies- at mozilla, but the stable versions are only available via 'third party' sources. (i've seen a couple of comments that suggest the 32bit versions automagically, except for flash, work with 64bit systems; but they don't work at all with mine (possibly i'm missing some 32bit compatibility libraries?))
Firefox 11 and Thunderbird 11 released Posted Mar 15, 2012 16:14 UTC (Thu) by basmevissen (subscriber, #54935) [Link]
Completely agree. For Windows, there is Waterfox (http://waterfoxproject.org/). Would be nice to have 64 builds directly from Mozilla for all platforms.
Firefox 11 and Thunderbird 11 released Posted Mar 15, 2012 17:42 UTC (Thu) by eupator (guest, #44581) [Link]
https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/...
https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/...
There are no official 64-bit Windows releases.
Firefox 11 and Thunderbird 11 released Posted Mar 15, 2012 17:51 UTC (Thu) by theophrastus (guest, #80847) [Link]
Thank you! ...why is this not better published? aren't the majority of (linux) systems 64bit now?
Firefox 11 and Thunderbird 11 released Posted Mar 15, 2012 21:55 UTC (Thu) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]
I believe the reason is that 64-bit builds are not fully QA'd yet. The automatic testing infrastructure is focused on 32-bit builds, 64-bit ones are in the process of being added.
Firefox 11 and Thunderbird 11 released Posted Mar 16, 2012 18:21 UTC (Fri) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link]
I wonder if there are still some issues that are specific to 64-bit builds. For example, right-clicking to open in a new tab often reopens the most-recently opened link, rather than what I clicked on, which is rather frustrating. It only seems to happen regularly on one site I visit, though, and I haven't been able to reproduce it with a concise test case.
The fact that this bug has been there for so long, though, makes me wonder if only us 64-bit users are affected, and that that's why they're sticking with 32-bit by default.
Also, the 64-bit builds probably chew a ton more memory. I keep a metric ton of tabs open, and my Firefox session hovers around 2GB RSS. (It was up over 3GB before I gave it a "hygienic reboot." Also, I found that ad-blocking https://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php saves a couple hundred megabytes all by itself.) Much of that 2GB is consumed by various Javascript-related stuff according to about:memory, and I imagine that's all very pointer intensive.
Given Firefox's laser focus on memory footprint, I imagine that also pushes them to defaulting everyone to 32-bit builds. Unfortunately for me, they don't seem to work "out of the box" for me on my 64-bit system, so I have to go hunting at the FTP site as linked above.
(I'd be happy if we could have a "small" memory model with 32-bit pointers, along the lines of this -- https://sites.google.com/site/x32abi/ -- as long as I could also still run true full 64-bit apps when needed. That seems like a good compromise to put pointer-heavy programs on a diet while still taking advantage of x86-64's other features.)
Firefox 11 and Thunderbird 11 released Posted Mar 16, 2012 18:32 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
I run 64 bit firefox on linux without any of the problems that you are describing.
> 'd be happy if we could have a "small" memory model with 32-bit pointers, along the lines of this
the X32 architecture is under development for Linux. It's not in the kernel yet, but it's getting close.
|
|||||||||||||