For those that aren’t aware, there is a 64-bit version of Firefox lurking in the nightly builds of the browser which you can grab over here if you’re feeling adventurous. I say that because the nightly builds are usually for testing purposes only and may have numerous bugs and other issues and cannot be expected to be as stable and robust as an official public release.
Anyway, I am giving it a go as I want to see how a native 64-bit browser performs compared to the 32-bit version of Firefox. With a stack of tabs open I was still seeing 1.9GB of memory being utilised (out of a maximum of 2GB for a 32-bit application under Windows).
I did consider using alternatives such as Waterfox and Pale Moon but didn’t fancy being stuck using an older Firefox build particularly with the various security flaws that have been patched since those versions had been released and superseded. It was also convenient to use the vanilla Firefox nightly build as it would pick up and use all of my extensions straight off the bat without further configuration. Also, given that my computer has 12GB of RAM in it I thought I’d see how much RAM the 64-bit version of Firefox would actually utilise if I used it in the same manner as the 32-bit version.
As always, I’ll let you know how I go but i am prepared for things to go pear-shaped and to go back to my 32-bit version of Firefox.
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