Firefox at 64-bit: Do You Care?

Mozilla has begun collecting feedback on what appears to be a more serious approach to move Firefox for Windows from 32 to 64 bit. 

Taking the step from 32-bit to 64-bit has been much more difficult than many had anticipated and has been in the workings for close to a decade - compare that to the relatively quick transition from 16-bit to 32-bit in the mid 1990s. Of course, there are hurdles that need to be overcome and the benefits of a 64-bit app are only now becoming much more mainstream with more vendors now motivated to think about a transition.

Mozilla's product manager, Asa Dotzler, just posted a somewhat careful question to the Firefox community and asked users what they would expect from a 64-bit version. The question by itself may be confusing as the perception of a technology may not be aligned with its potential. However, Dotzler's post indicates that very little research has been done on Mozilla's side to figure out what the opportunities of a 64-bit Firefox really are as he tells his blog readers that "any help is appreciated."

Of course, Mozilla has done some research and was out quite early with a 64-bit version of Firefox. Firefox 3.1 was the first 64-bit version of Firefox and was released in fall of 2008. "Released" is an overstatement as Windows Firefox 64-bit builds have never made it past the developer channel and are even today only offered via a nightly build download (now in version 8.0). Last week, Mozilla announced much more serious test builds of Windows 64-bit builds as it installed Windows 2008 servers "that can generate the 64-bit version of Mozilla Firefox."

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Firefox 4 Averages 5K Downloads Per Minute

Four days after the release of its Firefox 4 browser, Mozilla on Friday released some stats about the launch, revealing that it hit 15.85 million downloads in the first 48 hours, with an average of 5,503 downloads per minute.

"The response to Mozilla Firefox 4 has been astounding," Mozilla said in a blog post that also included an infographic (click below) with launch stats.

After day one, the download tally was at 7.1 million. At its peak, Firefox 4 was attracting 10,200 downloads per minute about 91.7 downloads per second. After the first 48 hours, users had downloaded 193.4 megabytes worth of browser.
Firefox 4 infographic

The top region downloading Firefox 4 was Europe, with 6.63 million, while the U.S. was the top country with 4.45 million.

Mozilla had some trivia to go along with its numbers. If each download were a mile, for example, that would equal 33 round trips to the moon. The 48-hour download tally is also bigger than the population of Los Angeles, the 12th largest city in the world, Mozilla said. Finally, it's also equal to the entire Internet population in 1995.

As of 5:30pm on Friday, the tally was at 26.6 million.

Microsoft's IE9, which made its debut last week, reached 2.35 million downloads in its first 24 hours. However, at this point, its reach is limited. IE9 can only be downloaded on machines running Windows Vista and Windows 7 - not XP - in order to accomplish its hardware acceleration using those OSes' version of DirectX multimedia APIs. According to February data from Net Applications, about 55 percent of computer users worldwide still use Windows XP, followed by 23 percent on Windows 7 and 11 percent on Vista.

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