Has Anyone Ever Heard of Waterfox?

Lord Rickles · **Posted:** January 24th, 2012, 5:54 pm

Apparently Mozilla came out with a browser specifically for 64 bit PCs called Waterfox late last month. Here's the article on PC World:
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/a ... erfox_90.html?tk=out

Has anyone heard of this before, or better yet, has tried it out? I'm wondering if it is really worth switching over to or not.

Adbot · **Posted:** January 24th, 2012, 5:54 pm

Shane · **Posted:** January 24th, 2012, 6:31 pm

You could use it, wouldn't be any reason not to. Mozilla typically starts these projects as incubators for ideas that'll eventually make it into the main Firefox (or not). If the idea is well received and proves to be worth it, they'll implement it. The opposite can happen, remember Ubiquity? It was supposed to be an alternate UI for Firefox, do you see it today? No.

Pfkninenines · Global Moderator 12/4/08

Huh. News to me that it got approved as an official project by Mozilla, but I suspect as Shane said it's an incubator and likely a good sign of things to come. Most all operating systems are x64 at this point, and beyond actually having x64 browsers as an option, popular plugins for those x64 browsers have increasingly become commonplace. I believe Adobe has a x64 version of Flash, and I know there is a x64 version of Java... Combined with HTML5 capabilities, and pretty much everything is covered.

With more and more going on in browsers, be it websites that are essentially running applications, or insane JavaScript/ other usage. With this increased usage, the 4GB limit of x86 is going to be hit increasingly often... Probably not so much within a year or so, but sooner or later x64 browsers will have to be used. It's better to start smoothing out the edges now, rather than deal with a clusterfrak later.