Mozilla quietly ceases Firefox 64-bit development

[xelosia]

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.

Although originally willing to shelve the idea for a time if it proved controversial, Smedberg later, well, shelved that idea:

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.

The engineer then posted a thread titled "Disable windows 64 builds" on Bugzilla, asking developers to "stop building windows [sic] 64 builds and tests." These include the order to stop building Windows 64-bit nightly builds and repatriate existing Windows 64-bit nightly users onto Windows 32-bit builds using a custom update.
In order to stave off argument, even though one participant suggested that 50 percent of nightly testers were using the system, perhaps as 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."

Mozilla quietly ceases Firefox 64-bit development | Internet & Media - CNET News

[MattyMatt]

If you want 64, get Opera, better browser anyway.

[joshjaks]

Used to use chrome till I found out from one of my IT bros that if you uninstall it, it screws up a ton of your settings. I think that might explain a while back how Microsoft word became a default browser. Still, never totally figured out how that happened.