Hi folks. I should introduce myself first. I'm a new product manager working on Firefox for Desktop. I've been working on an assessment of launching 64 bit for about 6 weeks. In that time, I've had conversations with representatives from every engineering and QA team whose work would be required to launch and support 64 bit, as well as strategy and marketing team members.
We have a good understanding of the work required. The development work, as you might suspect, is largely done. We still produce 64 bit builds. The notable areas remaining are: - completing test coverage - working on plugin/add-on compatibility - writing/updating the installer - automating/augmenting/reallocating QA resources to support the additional QA needs on an ongoing basis, and - some open product questions around how we roll it out, how we announce and promote it, etc. That's just the work, it is known and straightforward, though not trivial. Choosing to advance 64 means putting something else on hold. Therefore, we are also looking at the reasons to launch 64 bit. There are user reasons to do this, and there are Mozilla innovation reasons to do this. We have also been watching industry estimates of 64 bit Windows adoption, because we need to understand how many users would benefit from 64 bit. The overwhelming majority of Internet users could neither tell you what 64 bit means, nor will they have seen Google's announcement. Still Chris, you're absolutely correct. Many of the Mozilla faithful and industry watchers may think we're reacting to Google. The bug is here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1007726. We actually began informal conversations a few weeks before I entered the bug. The Mozilla community and press will hopefully take that into consideration in judging our intent, but it's important for us to get our timing right than to try to win at the PR race. Remaining on par with other browsers is a big consideration in launching 64 bit, but as I mentioned above, the primary drivers must be because it's better for users, because it allows Mozilla to advance the browser innovations we've already been working on, and above all that the user base is willing and able to take advantage of it. Above all, I want to reassure you we are being methodical about the timing and planning of 64 bit. We don't have the resources other companies have, and a decision to advance one area means putting another on hold. Lastly, 64 bit is exciting. I'm glad we're having these conversations, and Ive been thrilled to be able to work on it. I will update that bug ticket above in the near future, and we'll keep the community notified when things start moving. Thanks, Javaun Moradi On Tuesday, June 3, 2014 3:51:36 PM UTC-4, Ehsan Akhgari wrote: > On 2014-06-03, 2:37 PM, Chris Peterson wrote: > > > http://blog.chromium.org/2014/06/try-out-new-64-bit-windows-canary-and.html > > > > > > What is the status of Firefox builds for Win64? When Mozilla releases > > > Win64 builds (again), we'll be seen as reacting to Google when we've > > > actually been working on it for a while. :\ > > > > I believe dmajor is either working on this, or is aware of the plans. > > > > Cheers, > > Ehsan _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
