#Mozilla firefox 64 bit download
Still, if you’re not using your computer for mission-critical work, download a 64-bit Nightly build of Firefox for Windows and give it a spin. The earliest we’ll see an official 64-bit build of Firefox for Windows is with Firefox 8, which is due in November. It’s important to note that Mozilla doesn’t yet support 64-bit Firefox, but with an army of Windows 64-bit build bots now churning out test and Nightly builds, the wheels have certainly been set in motion. This could be due to the 64-bit build of Flash Player, however - or it could be that the new memory management features in Firefox 8 have not yet been turned on in the 64-bit build. The plugin-container was also twice the size under Firefox 圆4: 100MB when playing a YouTube video compared to 50MB for Firefox 32-bit. With the same set of tabs, Firefox 64-bit had a memory footprint of 320MB, compared to just 230MB for Firefox 32-bit. Memory-wise, the story isn’t quite so happy: the 64-bit build of Firefox definitely uses more memory. Firefox 8 64-bit (right) Click the image to zoom in slightly In almost every regard, then, the 64-bit build seems to be faster than the 32-bit build - and while it might be entirely objective, the 64-bit build really does feel faster too.įirefox 8 32-bit (left) vs. With the Kraken JavaScript benchmark, however, the 64-bit build destroys the 32-bit version by a good 10%. With the slightly-dated SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, Firefox 8 32-bit was about 5% faster than its 64-bit brother: 171ms vs 180ms. Most IE Test Drive benchmarks resulted in similar scores, with the 64-bit build sometimes creeping ahead by a few percent. In other benchmarks, the difference between 32- and 64-bit builds is less noticeable. The most evident and important improvement is in the 64-bit build’s handling of the DOM Operations benchmark it’s almost 25% faster, which results in almost every dynamic website loading faster and feeling more responsive. The Social Networking benchmark is also JavaScript-intensive, but it tests encryption and filtering functions, which the 64-bit build seems to be better at. The 64-bit build beats the 32-bit build in every regard except for the Data benchmark, which tests the JavaScript engine’s alacrity with arrays. The results speak for themselves: Firefox 8 64-bit is about 10% faster than Firefox 8 32-bit. Firefox 8 64-bit (right) Click either image to zoom in slightly The following results are from the ExtremeTech test rig which houses an Intel i7 930 with 6GB of RAM and an Nvidia GTX 460.įirefox 8 32-bit (left) vs.
Just how fast is the 64-bit version of Firefox 8? About 10% faster than the 32-bit version - but instead of taking our word for it, take a look at the comparative results from the Peacekeeper suite, the most comprehensive browser benchmark. In other words, there’s very little reason to not use Firefox 8 圆4 you can download a copy from the Nightly site (it won’t interfere with your stable install), grab Flash 11 beta for Windows 圆4 and Java 6 for Windows 圆4, and start surfing. Even more importantly, though, there are now stable 64-bit browser plug-ins for Flash and Java. Today, however, Firefox 8 64-bit is stable and it’s fast it’s really, really fast.
When I first took 64-bit Firefox for a workout last year, it wasn’t the best of experiences: it crashed, JavaScript performance was abysmal, and it was generally sub-par compared to the stable, 32-bit branch.