Mozilla's Benjamin Smedberg posted a thread on their Google Groups titled "Turning off win64 builds," declaring that the 64-bit version of Firefox for Windows would never been released."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", Smedberg posted.
He listed the following reasons as to why they are killing Firefox 64-bit:
- Many plugins are not available in 64-bit versions.
- The plugins that are available don't work correctly in Firefox because we haven't implemented things like windowproc hooking, which means that hangs are more common.
- Crashes submitted by 64-bit users are currently not high priority because we are working on other things.
- This is frustrating for users because they feel (and are!) second-class.
- It is also frustrating for stability team triage because crash-stats does not easily distinguish between 32-bit and 64-bit builds in the topcrash lists and other reports. We basically ignore a set of nightly "topcrashes" because they are 64-bit only.
Source: TNW