• E-mail this page
• |  Print this page
• | 
• | 
• | 

64-Bit Firefox: What's Your Hurry?

After installing 64-bit Windows on one of my test machines, I scurried around to see what 64-bit desktop applications are available in the open source world. Firefox is one of them, but not officially -- at least, not yet. The reasons for this are not what you might think.

At least one project has appeared that's devoted to creating 64-bit editions of popular Mozilla products, Firefox included. The creator's plan is to back-contribute the work he does for Firefox 3.6 and up, since there is talk on the Mozilla side of offering official 64-bit builds in the future.

So why is there no official 64-bit Firefox build right now? Possibly for the same reason many other applications don't yet exist in 64-bit editions:

1. Relatively low platform demand. Most of us are still running 32-bit operating systems, and those of us on 64-bit Windows can run 32-bit apps interchangeably. (This is, admittedly, changing quite fast -- the last PC I bought shipped with 64-bit Windows.)
2. Third-party components -- plugins -- that rely on binaries need to be 64-bit as well. Best example: Flash. There's no native 64-bit Flash plugin in Windows, from everything I've seen -- you need to run the 32-bit edition of Firefox to have Flash support. Photoshop suffers from the same problem as well, and since a big part of its draw as a product is the huge gallery of third-party add-ons, there's been no rush to get a 64-bit edition out the door if it's just going to break backwards compatibility.
3. The performance improvements you get with a native 64-bit build of Firefox are not particularly dramatic right now. It's been argued that today's JavaScript-heavy web browsing demands a browser that runs such computationally-intensive code as efficiently as possible, but as Google Chrome and Firefox 3.5 both demonstrated (both 32-bit), what matters more is the optimization of the engine under the hood and not 32- vs. 64-bit.

The first and second of these reasons is self-evident. The third is supported by my own admittedly unscientific usage of the 64-bit build. The difference in speed isn't massive, and there's enough broken compatibility with certain things to make it tough sledding for daily use. I suspect OpenOffice.org has the same issues: the things that can be optimized aren't things that benefit from a 64-bit infrastructure in the first place.

What I have to remember is that this is only the beginning. With Firefox, as with any open source project, the first steps towards 64-bit support can be taken by the community of developers around the project. They don't have to wait for an official build; they can jump right in, build a copy now, and submit their experiences back when such support begins in earnest by the Mozilla team.

Also, if truly radical performance improvement through 64-bitness can be achieved with other optimizations that aren't part of the trunk code yet, why not let anyone who feels they can contribute something take a stab at it? Based on my own (again, admittedly limited) experiences, the real improvements are going to come from optimizing core algorithms for things like SSL and image processing rather than the rendering engine as a whole -- but in a case like this, it's a great thing to be proven wrong.

If you do decide to give the above-linked 64-bit build a try, back up your existing FF profile or run the 64-bit edition under a different profile. The 64-bit build uses the same profile as your current Firefox installation, and the last thing you want to do is trash your profile with what is, after all, beta software. (Anyone for a PortableApps / no-install build?)

InformationWeek Analytics has published an independent analysis of the current state of open source adoption. Download the report here (registration required).

Follow me and the rest of InformationWeek on Twitter.

« Bing's Fake Twitter Glitter | Main | Google Retools Contacts In Google Apps With New APIs »