Mozilla Brings Back Firefox 64-Bit For Windows Nightly Builds 209
An anonymous reader writes "Last month, Mozilla Engineering Manager Benjamin Smedberg quietly announced that the 64-bit version of Firefox for Windows would never see the light of day. After what he referred to as 'significant negative feedback,' Smedberg has announced he has reviewed that feedback, consulted with his release engineering team, and has decided on a modification to the original plan: Firefox 64-bit for Windows may still never be released, but nightly builds will live another day."
Re:I was using Waterfrox (Score:4, Interesting)
Probably because flash, java, and other plugin makers are so slow to move to 64 bits. Not to mention many out there feel a browser should not use more than 4 gigs of ram and is a light text and graphics reader. Not a minature operating system running complex ajax applications
Accountability = None (Score:4, Interesting)
It's good to see that someone is being held accountable here. Benjamin Smedberg creates a shitload of negative publicity, pisses off a proportion of dedicated testers and he:
A. Gets a promotion
B. Is removed from positions of responsibility because he demonstrates poor judgement
C. Nothing happens
D. Gets a pay increase.
Answer = C
Come on guys at least make him wear a T shirt for a month that says, I must not override the recommendations of others in relation to 64 bit builds.
One of the key problems in organisations is that people aren't held accountable for poor judgement, or at least a running sheet is not maintained. Ben will probably continue to be promoted even through he has demonstrated that he has a fundamental lack of connection with what end users want. There is obviously something wrong occurring in the firefox mozilla groupthink and yet nothing is being done.
32-bit is insecure (Score:5, Interesting)
Haven't these people heard of ASLR [wikipedia.org] and heap spraying [wikipedia.org] Do they not understand the concepts?
Without 64-bit, you have two huge security problems. The first is that there simply isn't enough address space to randomize well. Attackers can guess things. They guess right often enough that the effort is worthwhile. The second huge security problem is that the address space is easy to fill with code-equivalent data for a ROP [wikipedia.org] attack. Actually, with Firefox you could even use real code [wikipedia.org]!
Using a 32-bit browser in 2012 is kind of insane. It's near-complete security FAIL.
Re:I was using Waterfrox (Score:4, Interesting)
Having a >4GB footprint is not the only reason to move to a 64-bit address space. As more software becomes 64-bit, those legacy 32-bit apps become more of a problem, both in terms of longer application launch times (because the 32-bit library stack that it uses isn't loaded initially) and in terms of added memory pressure (because of all those unnecessary libraries loaded into RAM).