Firefox 64-bit Builds Discussion Thread

[k1net1cs]

I just thought that we should have something to keep everything about Firefox 64-bit in one place instead of sporadic version number-specific threads.
For starters, I'll just post a couple of links where you can obtain which versions.

Waterfox (18.0.1)
Pale Moon x64 (20.0.1)
Cyberfox (20.0.1)

Misc. builds :
XhmikosR (current beta)
fbuild (nightly + AVX support)
htguard (current stable & beta; also includes 64-bit builds of Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, and BlueGriffon)

I'll update this post whenever necessary, and feel free to suggest additional links to other 64-bit builds.
I'll probably add some benchmarks later on, but that's whenever I have the time.

[k1net1cs]

Sorry for bumping this; thought you guys might be interested in some more alternatives to Waterfox. =b

If there's any Pale Moon x64 users here, Moonchild (PM author) won't update to 18.0 codebase yet but the security updates, so no IonMonkey (the new JS engine) for PM at the moment.
He aims for 19.0 when IonMonkey is, hopefully, stable.

[Watcher]

I've used Pale Moon x64 for many years.
Never an issue.

[k1net1cs]

Pale Moon has been updated to 15.4.
In general, existing users should've been notified of the update automatically.

Several security and stability issues have been fixed in this update:

• Deal with bogus Turktrust certs MFSA 2013-20
• Several memory security hazards fixed MFSA 2013-01
• Updated OTS library to r95 to fix potential font-related exploits
• Security fix for libpixman stack buffer overflow
• Fix for certain types of input lag on Twitter/Facebook & other sites with unnecessary DOM invalidations
• Fix for HTTP pipelining re-use (improve pipelining logic)
• Performance&stability updates to cairo and direct2d back-end
• Improved performance for repeat gradients

[tsunami231]

I might have to give this 64 bit variants another try 18.0 Firefox seem to be laggy compared to older versions

[lucidus]

Hmm .. I installed palemoon now and the default scrolling is smooth unlike stock firefox. Promising, I will give it a spin. How do I import my firefox profile to it?

edit: woops .. I seem to be running 32bit PM .. anyway I doubt there will be much of a difference between the two.

[Parabola]

Palemoon up and running.. feels much smoother and polished than Firefox haha.
My last version of Firefox(17 beta) was broken or something, misplaced images, crashes...

This seems to be better so far..

[k1net1cs]

Originally Posted by lucidus

Hmm .. I installed palemoon now and the default scrolling is smooth unlike stock firefox. Promising, I will give it a spin. How do I import my firefox profile to it?

The dev provides a profile migration tool for that.

Originally Posted by lucidus

edit: woops .. I seem to be running 32bit PM .. anyway I doubt there will be much of a difference between the two.

Actually, the dev advises you to just use the 32-bit version due to some possible problems with your graphics driver.

Graphics drivers, regardless of version (32-bit or 64-bit), are still more focused for 32-bit applications (which most games are), so native 64-bit apps trying to interact with the driver (via hardware-accelerated drawing calls) tend to get quite unstable (crashes, lags, and whatnots).
Before the 'there are 64-bit games' argument pops up, I need to remind you that those games are likely already having their own profiles in the drivers, so they already have some specific fix(es) to them.

[pimp_gimp]

Originally Posted by k1net1cs

I just thought that we should have something to keep everything about Firefox 64-bit in one place instead of sporadic version number-specific threads.
For starters, I'll just post a couple of links where you can obtain which versions.

Waterfox (16.0.1)
Pale Moon x64 (15.4)
Cyberfox (18.0.0; need to be registered in the forum for download links)

Misc. builds :
XhmikosR (current stable & beta)
fbuild (nightly + AVX support)
htguard (current stable & beta; also includes 64-bit builds of Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, and BlueGriffon)

I'll update this post whenever necessary, and feel free to suggest additional links to other 64-bit builds.
I'll probably add some benchmarks later on, but that's whenever I have the time.

Here a link to Cyberfox at Sourceforge.

[k1net1cs]

Originally Posted by pimp_gimp

Here a link to Cyberfox at Sourceforge.

Thanks!
Updated.

[tsunami231]

So far I triled Waterfox and Cyberfox I dont see a difference vs 32bit all installed tested on SSD but all Temp and cache is redirected to my HDD, but then I have my profile set up to use Ram as cache and not the SSD/HDD

Waterfox Randomly crashes on me and cyberfox runs fine. I just don't see a difference vs 32bit that or I just look in the wrong places for differences.

[lucidus]

Originally Posted by k1net1cs

The dev provides a profile migration tool for that.


Actually, the dev advises you to just use the 32-bit version due to some possible problems with your graphics driver.

Graphics drivers, regardless of version (32-bit or 64-bit), are still more focused for 32-bit applications (which most games are), so native 64-bit apps trying to interact with the driver (via hardware-accelerated drawing calls) tend to get quite unstable (crashes, lags, and whatnots).
Before the 'there are 64-bit games' argument pops up, I need to remind you that those games are likely already having their own profiles in the drivers, so they already have some specific fix(es) to them.

Nice .. thanks for the tool's link I reinstalled PM for a proper experience with the same environment. PM is handling hardware acceleration better than Fx stock did, my clocks aren't jumping around wildly for a change and it has by default the same tweak I had applied for scrolling.

I see about the x64 thing, if I ever try it I'll just disable hardware acceleration but I'm quite content with the 32bit browser and see no reason to fool around anyway.

Now if Mozilla added TMP's tab management functions and removed support for the ancient hardware, as claimed by PM, the browser would improve significantly I'm sure. At least the RAM usage is tame now.

[WhiteLightning]

Originally Posted by lucidus

Hmm .. I installed palemoon now and the default scrolling is smooth unlike stock firefox.

Im using this https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...rc=userprofile

[PantherX]

Originally Posted by tsunami231

So far I triled Waterfox and Cyberfox I dont see a difference vs 32bit all installed tested on SSD but all Temp and cache is redirected to my HDD, but then I have my profile set up to use Ram as cache and not the SSD/HDD

Waterfox Randomly crashes on me and cyberfox runs fine. I just don't see a difference vs 32bit that or I just look in the wrong places for differences.

I am currently using Waterfox 16.0.1 (and am waiting for the 18.0 or 18.0.1 to be released when ready, it's currently under development).

I don't have any issues with it on my system. For me Waterfox is a million times much better than Firefox as I mostly have 50+ tabs open, currently, have 231 tabs and not an issue at all I decided to test the stability of Waterfox by opening 301 tabs including youtube videos and content heavy webpages and once everything was loaded, it used ~5.5 GB RAM and was fully functional without any lags or freeze-ups

[k1net1cs]

Originally Posted by lucidus

Now if Mozilla added TMP's tab management functions and removed support for the ancient hardware, as claimed by PM, the browser would improve significantly I'm sure. At least the RAM usage is tame now.

Well, that'd effectively kill TMP user base, yes? =b
Agree on the RAM usage; seems like PM's garbage collection works better than stock.
Still uses sh!tload of RAM with multiple tabs, but saner than stock.

Originally Posted by PantherX

I don't have any issues with it on my system. For me Waterfox is a million times much better than Firefox as I mostly have 50+ tabs open, currently, have 231 tabs and not an issue at all I decided to test the stability of Waterfox by opening 301 tabs including youtube videos and content heavy webpages and once everything was loaded, it used ~5.5 GB RAM and was fully functional without any lags or freeze-ups

Personally, I didn't have issues either, even with my 'paltry' 8GB opening 30+ tabs at once.
It's just that it hasn't been updated since 16.0.1 (due to personal matters like his studies IIRC) that I needed other build with the security updates post 16.0.1.
Since Waterfox is mostly about performance (from compiler settings) and PM is all about code optimization, the natural route for me was to shift to PM.
Wasn't really interested with vanilla x64 builds of Firefox, and I've only discovered Cyberfox (and htguard's) from Waterfox's thread.

[lucidus]

Skins don't work with Palemoon? I changed the minversion of FxChrome to 15 to get it to work but the default theme sticks even though it shows FxChrome to be enabled.

[PantherX]

Assuming that no more bugs are found, Waterfox 18.0.1 will be released very shortly http://www.overclock.net/t/975626/wa...#post_19086768

[k1net1cs]

Originally Posted by lucidus

Skins don't work with Palemoon? I changed the minversion of FxChrome to 15 to get it to work but the default theme sticks even though it shows FxChrome to be enabled.

Pale Moon does support skins, but the FXChrome author apparently does not want to support anything under FF 17.0 for FXChrome 18.1.
Try FXChrome 16.0.1 instead.

[lucidus]

Originally Posted by k1net1cs

Pale Moon does support skins, but the FXChrome author apparently does not want to support anything under FF 17.0 for FXChrome 18.1.
Try FXChrome 16.0.1 instead.

I think I'll wait a while, PM will be updated to Firefox 19 soon enough and I'll install the skin then. How do I bring back the link preview? I searched their forum and the suggestion was to remove the status bar add on but there is no such thing in the add on manager :-S

[k1net1cs]

Originally Posted by lucidus

How do I bring back the link preview?

Options -> Status bar options.
Set it as such.

[lucidus]

Well that was hidden away Works great now, thanks

[k1net1cs]

It's just two clicks away, you lazy bum. =b

Anyway, just compared Waterfox 18.0.1 and PM x64 15.4 using Google Octane, and Waterfox won by having 6300-ish points against PM x64's 5500-ish.
(of course Chrome still leads by having over 10k points but hey...)

[tsunami231]

Originally Posted by k1net1cs

It's just two clicks away, you lazy bum. =b

Anyway, just compared Waterfox 18.0.1 and PM x64 15.4 using Google Octane, and Waterfox won by having 6300-ish points against PM x64's 5500-ish.
(of course Chrome still leads by having over 10k points but hey...)

dont chrome preload webpages before they are even clicked by default? something not really defualt on other browsers. imo that only reason why chrome is faster in benchs. In actual usage its the same atlest to me.

[k1net1cs]

Originally Posted by tsunami231

dont chrome preload webpages before they are even clicked by default? something not really defualt on other browsers. imo that only reason why chrome is faster in benchs. In actual usage its the same atlest to me.

Most, if not all, browser benchmarks don't test for page loading, but rather page rendering.
That is, they don't take into account how much time did it take for a browser to load (as in getting the data for) the page, but how fast it can render or process the loaded data.

As such, as most benchmarks are mainly a JavaScript engine benchmark, the tests didn't take how fast a browser (down)load the .js file into account, but rather how fast a browser can process (run, compile; whichever terminology suits you) the (down)loaded .js file.
So, yeah, Chrome's prefetching doesn't really matter much on tests.

[tsunami231]

dont know i see no diffrence speed wise or rendering wise on chrome or Firefox