Mozilla Quietly Ceases Firefox 64-bit Development

Mozilla engineering manager Benjamin Smedberg has asked developers to stop nightly builds for Firefox versions optimized to run on 64-bit versions of Windows. A developer thread posted on the Google Groups mozilla.dev.planning discussion board, titled Turning off win64 builds by Smedberg proposed the move.

Claiming that 64-bit Firefox is a "constant source of misunderstanding and frustration," the engineer wrote that the builds often crash, many plugins are not available in 64-bit versions, and hangs are more common due to a lack of coding which causes plugins to function incorrectly. In addition, Smedberg argues that this causes users to feel "second class," and crash reports between 32-bit and 64-bit versions are difficult to distinguish between for the stability team. Users can still run 32-bit Firefox on 64-bit Windows.