14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla is building different flavors of the next iteration of its open source browser, offering both 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) builds for testing. At the end of the past week, Mozilla’s Armen Zambrano Gasparnian revealed that the company was producing the 64-bit builds of Firefox 4.0 for Windows. At this point in time, early adopters can download a very early pre-Beta 2 release of Firefox 4.0, in 32-bit (x86) as well as 64-bit (x64) versions.
“I had to switch to Visual Studio 2008 since in VS2010 we don't jemalloc support. I still have to test that the compiler switch won't cause any regression to anybody who has a build built off VS2010. The following build has: been built with MSVC9 (VS2008); Windows 7 SDK; has no update; it now has jemalloc; it still does not have PGO. To note, I have tested the build on win7 64-bit build and has worked as expected,” Gasparnian stated.
I first told you about the fact that Mozilla was cooking an official 64-bit variant of Firefox back in May 2010. Since then the open source browser vendor has made some progress, and is currently offering nightly builds of x64 and x86 Firefox 4.0 pre-Beta. At this point in time, nightly builds are all that testers can hope for, but Gasparnian is hard at work focused on pushing the release forward. Still, the efforts around x64 Firefox 4.0 are a tad limited, with just a single machine used for testing, and Mozilla performing approximately a test per day.
The past week Mozilla indicated that Firefox 4.0 could hit the Beta 2 development milestone as early as this week. An official release date hasn’t been confirmed at this point in time, and is unclear whether end users will be getting a fully fledge Beta 2 of 64-bit Firefox 4.0, or if the browser vendor will continue to focus on 32-bit.
Firefox 4.0 Beta 1 is available for download here.
Follow me on Twitter @MariusOiaga.