Interviewed by CNN on 15/02/2012 17:13, Gerry Hickman told the world: > Thanks for the replies, > > I did expect "plug-ins" to be given as a reason for not moving forward, > but they'll just have to update them, just like device drivers had to be > updated for x64. > > I found a similar thread on Adobe > > http://forums.adobe.com/message/4047605 > > This is even more backward looking. > > I'd expect SeaMonkey to be in the lead on this, not IE and FireFox. > Anyway, there were some positive replies above, and I do look forward to > seeing SeaMonkey in x64!
Gerry, the problem is not the supported plugins. As I pointed out, the big three (Flash, Java and Silverlight) are already available in x64; PDF is not a big problem in my view (I, and many others, would make do without an in-browser PDF reader until such a beast is available with no big loss). Quicktime/WindowsMedia/RealMedia are dying out, but yes, if they saw a need they would push some sort of x64 plugin to market. Long term, all of the above will be eventually replaced by HTML5 and PDF.js. The real problem is the "long tail" of lesser-used, sometimes special-purpose plugins (some of which haven't been supported for years) which people need to access offbeat websites. Yes, those are probably security risks, and people *should* have stopped using them years ago. But *forcing* people to give up something is no way to gain users. Every time a feature was dropped from Seamonkey, for whatever reason (incompatibility with newer versions of Gecko, lack of personnel with the ability to support/port it, whatever), there was a lot of protests in the forum. Even if the feature was replaced with another one with a similar role. People do get frustrated when something stops working, and they are usually very quick to blame the dev team for some imagined personality fault on theirs. The naive proposed solution is "Well, then why not make both of them available and let the users choose?" That's what Microsoft did, after all. But the Seamonkey council is not Microsoft. They have finite resources, and adding a fourth main build (currently there are Win32, OSX and Linux builds) would necessarily impact negatively the other builds. (And, by the way, IE-x64 is not taking the world by storm. Even in the IE world. People simply don't see any big advantage in the x64 build -- there are some, but they are kinda hidden from view. And the 32bit build still has more ActiveX plugins available.) Let's take a step back and look at it from the other side, that is, instead of looking at what we would lose from moving to full-x64, what would we *gain* from it. What's the most important gain of using a x64 browser? Allocating more than 4 Gb of RAM for the browser. How many people *really* need to do that currently? Not many, I'll bet. Hell, not that many people even HAVE over 4 Gb or RAM in their machines. The ones who do, have better uses for it than letting a browser take over all that RAM. If any browser goes over 1 Gb, even in very heavy usage, people tend to scream "Memory Hog!" (And, by the way, Firefox memory usage fell dramatically over the last year. Seamonkey benefits from it too, since they share the same core. So hitting 4Gb with Firefox or Seamonkey is *less* likely now than one year ago.) To sum it up: having a x64-native browser would give minimal benefits *right now,* but it would inconvenience a good number of users. The developers are looking into it, the goal IS to eventually move to x64, but they are waiting for As for "Seamonkey in the lead..." be real. Seamonkey depends on core technology developed by the Firefox project. The current build of Gecko for Win64 is classed as "experimental." Until it moves to a stable, supported status, there's no sense in building Seamonkey on top of it. -- MCBastos This message has been protected with the 2ROT13 algorithm. Unauthorized use will be prosecuted under the DMCA. -=-=- ... Sent from my Mont Blanc. * Added by TagZilla 0.7a1 running on Seamonkey 2.7.1 * Get it at http://xsidebar.mozdev.org/modifiedmailnews.html#tagzilla _______________________________________________ support-seamonkey mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-seamonkey
