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Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

It looks like Windows 7 64-bit will be officially supported with FF5, too.

You're kidding, right? Do they REALLY not support the fastest growing OS version + platform combo?

OEMs are finally paying attention to 64-bit computing, and Windows 7 has been replacing Vista like wildfire.... and FF is still two releases away from official Windows 7 64-bit support?

EDIT:

Oops. Seems stupid Aol/Weblogs/Switched/DowloadSquad (I don't even know what it's called any more!) didn't bother to fact-check, and they're referring to 64-bit native builds of Firefox.

EDIT2:

So I'm really being downvoted because the original story got it wrong? I guess that's one way to take out your anger on inaccurate writeups...

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They're not talking about "Windows 7 64-bit operating system", they're talking about "64-bit Firefox" (running on Windows 7 64-bit). One of the biggest slowdowns for this hasn't been FF's ability to run in 64-bit, but plugins (e.g. Flash) not having a 64-bit version for Windows.

>> You're kidding, right?

Nope, they're just misinformed; they read the roadmap incorrectly. What the Firefox devs mean is a 64-bit version of Firefox (i.e. an x64 process). Right now Firefox runs perfectly on both Windows 7 and 64-bit versions of Windows.

There are 32-bit and 64-bit builds of Firefox. The 64-bit builds only work on 64-bit machines -- and the 32-bit builds work on both 32- and 64-bit machines.

64-bit build for Windows?

Can you please provide a link to that, I'd like to test/use it.

If anyone’s interested, there are 64bit Windows builds at the bottom of https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/late...

The usual proviso apply of course: these are nightly builds and come with no guarentees, nor should they be used as an indication of the quality of the release going forwards.

Author here.

There are 64-bit nightly builds of FF4, but _only_ nightlies: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/lates...

This suggests that there won't be an official 64-bit build of Firefox 4 -- we'll have to wait for Firefox 5.

As some people comment below me, only some parts of it are working in the 64-bit space (and most notably, the Flash 64-bit plug-in is still beta/alpha.)

Firefox is far from becoming "more and more irrelevant". Just because you've switched to an alternate browser doesn't mean the rest of the world has. Chrome may be incrementally gaining some share, but it's mostly at the expense of IE. Firefox has almost 25% of the market, while Chrome is 5%.

Chrome currently has 16.5 percent global usage share, IE has 45 percent. FF's share remains stable at 31 percent. Chrome gained ten percent points in the last year, while IE lost ten percent points. At its current growth rate, Chrome will pass FF in 15 months.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-201002-201102

And just six short years after that it will eclipse 100% usage!

Hear, hear.

I've been using Chrome / Chromium exclusively since its release, primarily due to the simple, uncluttered UI and blazing speed. It was a breath of fresh air, and I switched readily.

But something changed with the recent Firefox 4 betas. The browser feels fast, again, and the UI seems more reasonable. I find Panorama useful. And slowly, Firefox is winning me back. In time, I think it may win back other developers, too. And if it does, I could easily see a fairly stable equilibrium developing between the two browsers.

Firefox needed the competition from Chrome, and in many ways, it's starting to meet that challenge.

Chrome doesn’t run in 64bit mode either on Windows or OS X.

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