Mozilla's engineering manager has requested that developers stop work on Windows 64-bit builds of Firefox.
A developer thread posted on the Google Groups mozilla.dev.planning discussion board, titled "Turning off win64 builds" by Smedberg proposed the disabling of the Windows 64-bit nightly builds for Firefox.
The reason was said to be that, Firefox 64-bit 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.
But some developers disagreed with the idea.
Smedberg later said that: "Thank you to everyone who participated in this thread. Given the existing information, I have decided to proceed with disabling windows 64-bit nightly and hourly builds. Please let us consider this discussion closed unless there is critical new information which needs to be presented."
Although, even though among the participants suggested that 50 percent of nightly testers were using the system, because an official 64-bit version of Firefox for Windows has never been released, Smedberg said it was "not the place to argue about this decision, which has already been made."
Via Cnet.
