While Adobe Flash and Java did work, others did not. You could only run 'some' plug-ins on 64-bit versions of Firefox, and not all of them.They were not provided as stable, beta or aurora builds.

64-bit builds were only available for the Nightly channel.

If you compared 32-bit versions of Firefox to their 64-bit builds on Windows in the past, you would have found out that they would differ in several aspects: There may also be security benefits to running 64-bit programs as opposed to running 32-bit programs. There may be other benefits: 64-bit applications can perform 64-bit register operations, which is faster than performing the same operation on a 32-bit system.

It may take some time until we get there in regards to consumer PCs, but it is not that unlikely anymore that PCs have more than 4 Gigabyte of RAM installed.Ĭonclusion: if Firefox uses a lot of RAM on your system, you may want to consider using a 64-bit version of the browser to avoid the memory limit. While it is unlikely that most users will run into the limits, new technologies such as web gaming and other real-time activities may increase the RAM needs of the browser, and may push browsers towards 64-bit eventually.Ī 64-bit version of Firefox that runs on a 64-bit Windows has much larger limits, from about 8 Terabytes to up to 128 Terabytes. If you run it on a 64-bit Windows system, it can use up to 4 Gigabytes of RAM. If you are running Firefox on a 32-bit Windows operating system, it can use 3 Gigabytes of memory at the most. That's the reason why you won't see 4 Gigabytes of available RAM on 32-bit versions of Windows even though you have installed that much, as part of it is used by other components. Technically, the 4 Gigabyte limit refers to the addressable memory space which the installed RAM, video cards, PCI memory range and other factors attribute to. Windows 8 Professional 64-bit supports 512 Gigabyte for example, while Windows 7 Professional 64-bit 192 Gigabyte. How much more depends on the version you are using. The physical memory limit of 32-bit versions of Windows is 4 Gigabyte, while 64-bit versions of Windows support more than that. One of the advantages of 64-bit software is that it may have more memory at its disposal, provided that that enough is installed on the 64-bit operating system.

Older versions of firefox windows