Mozilla releases 64-bit Firefox Developer Edition for Windows

[Arthur]

If you are already using the 32-bit Developer Edition of Firefox, uninstall this first before installing the 64-bit edition. Your existing profile will still work too.

 

Download (Direct Link)

 

In celebration of the 10th anniversary of Firefox, we unveiled Firefox Developer Edition, the first browser created specifically for developers. At that time, we also announced plans to ship a 64-bit version of Firefox. Today we’re happy to announce the next phase of that plan: 64-bit builds for Firefox Developer Edition are now available on Windows, adding to the already supported platforms of OS X and Linux.

 

A 64-bit build is a major step toward giving users rich, desktop-quality app experiences in the browser. Let’s also take a look at at some of the other features that make this a release worth noting. If you haven’t downloaded the Developer Edition browser yet, it’s a fine time to give it a try.

 

Run larger applications

A 32-bit browser is limited to 4GB of address space. That address space is further whittled down by fragmentation issues. Meanwhile, web applications are getting bigger and bigger. Browser-based games that deliver performant, native-like gameplay, such as those built with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, are often much larger than we expect from traditional web applications. These games ship with large assets that must be stored in memory so they can be synchronously loaded.

 

For some of the largest of these apps, a 64-bit browser means the difference between whether or not a game will run. For example, when porting to asm.js it’s recommended to keep heap size to 512mb in a 32-bit browser. With 64-bit that goes up to 2GB in a 64-bit version of Firefox.

 

Emscripten helps port C and C++ code to run on the Web and deliver native-like performance. For an in-depth look at how assets are stored and accessed using a variety of methods in asm.js/emscripten built applications, read Alon Zakai’s post on Synchronous Execution and File-System Access in Emscripten.

 

Gain faster execution and increased security

64-bit Firefox just goes faster. We get access to new hardware registers and instructions to speed up JavaScript code.

 

For asm.js code, the increased address space also lets us use hardware memory protection to safely remove bounds checks from asm.js heap accesses. The gains are pretty dramatic: 8-17% on the asmjs-apps-*-throughput tests as reported on arewefastyet.com.

 

The larger 64-bit address space also improves the effectiveness of ASLR (address space layout randomization), making it more difficult for web content to exploit the browser.

 

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Edited March 4, 2015 by Arthur