14 DAY TRIAL // News about 64-bit Firefox for Windows getting the axe from Benjamin Smedberg, head of engineering team, has been making the online rounds for the past days. The reason is simple: the resources allotted to sustaining this build are higher than the benefits.
Despite this “shocking” information, this does not affect the regular user in any way because said 64-bit edition of the browser was actually available only for the nightly builds of the browser. These are highly unstable versions, for testing purposes only.
To paint a clearer picture, Firefox Nightly builds are pre-alpha releases of the browser, so the amount of bugs is the highest from all the other versions of the rapid release cycle (Aurora, Beta and Stable). As such, only the “daredevil” category of Firefox user base runs it on their computers. Obviously, most of them are heavy-tab users that require more RAM than the 32-bit Windows can offer in order to run the browser sessions.
However, this segment, although very small compared to the total market share, is causing quite a stir, accusing Mozilla of losing interest in catering for all its users. Others have threatened to switch to a different browser. You can check the entire discussion here, the messages keep on coming.
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