Matt Howell will soon land stub installer support for 64-bit Windows in
Nightly 52 (bug 797208), as part of an effort to move more Firefox users
to 64-bit. About 66% of our Windows users are running 32-bit Firefox on
64-bit Windows. They're missing out on potential optimizations and fewer
OOM crashes from 64-bit Firefox.
Matt's change will only add 64-bit support to the stub installer, not
the Firefox updater. We will look into upgrading existing 32-bit Firefox
users to 64-bit next year (bug 1274659).
The stub installer will automatically select 32- or 64-bit Firefox
depending on the user's system configuration. Our proposed system
requirements to receive 64-bit by default are: 64-bit Windows 7/8/8.1/10
with at least 2 GB RAM. Users can manually override the default and
choose 32- or 64-bit on the stub installer's Options page. We don't plan
to support 64-bit XP or Vista.
64-bit should significantly reduce OOM crashes, always top crash #1 or
#2 for 32-bit Firefox on the Beta and Release channels. The following
re:dash query is a preview of the improved crash stats from 64-bit. Note
that this query may exaggerate 64-bit's benefit. We should compare 32-
and 64-bit Firefox both on 64-bit Windows, but this query doesn't
distinguish between 32-bit Firefox running on 32-bit or 64-bit Windows.
32-bit Firefox has a 4 GB virtual address space on 64-bit Windows and is
less likely to OOM than on 32-bit Windows, where it has a 2 GB virtual
address space.
Browser, content, and plugin process crashes/kilohour for Firefox 48
(Beta + Release):
32-bit Firefox: 3.76 2.15 11.37
64-bit Firefox: 3.22 1.32 0.39
https://sql.telemetry.mozilla.org/queries/1238#table
Flash and Silverlight are the only NPAPI plugins we have supported on
64-bit Firefox. We have waited until Firefox 52 to roll out 64-bit to
more users because we didn't want to regress users' plugin support.
Firefox 52 is disabling support for all NPAPI plugins other than Flash
(bug 1269807), so 64-bit's limited plugin support is no longer any
regression compared to 32-bit.
chris
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