Firefox 64-bit version of Windows was buried in November. Now, Mozilla, however, indicate that the browser version makes a comeback. The reason is that the 64-bit version of cessation of causing a negative feedback to burst.

Source: http://www.tietokone.fi/uutiset/64_bittinen_firefox_tekee_paluun_syy_on_erikoinen

Mozilla Engineering Manager Benjamin Smedberg last Friday quietly posted a thread over on the Google Groups mozilla.dev.planning discussion board titled “Turning off win64 builds.” By Wednesday, Smedberg had declared that the 64-bit version of Firefox for Windows would never see the light of day, unless Mozilla decides to revert the decision at some point in the future.

Mozilla is still making a troubling decision here. The company may end up alienating a good chunk of its enthusiasts, or at least those that haven’t yet fled to Google’s Chrome.

Indeed, the decision has resulted in a huge uproar from 64-bit for Windows users, as noted on a Hacker News thread pointing to another discussion board. A few users have even shown off screenshots of Firefox using huge amounts of memory, specifically more than Windows 32-bit can address.

Firefox users are thus left without much of an option. They can switch to OS X or Linux, both of which have full versions of Firefox 64-bit. Windows 64-bit users meanwhile can only consider Internet Explorer and Opera, since both Chrome and Safari don’t offer 64-bit flavors.

The organization generated $163.5 million in 2011, mostly from searches performed with Firefox. But it still lacks a strong foothold the world of smartphones and tablets.

With more than 400 million Firefox users, Mozilla doesn’t have a problem with relevance.

But it does have a problem with mobile.

So concludes Mitchell Baker, leader of the organization behind the open-source Web browser and other projects designed to keep the Internet free from proprietary constraints. Firefox, which just celebrated its eighth birthday, is the main lever that Mozilla uses to try to keep the Internet open. But Firefox is largely absent from the explosive growth in the mobile world of smartphones and tablets.

“The current state of the mobile ecosystem concerns us the most,” said Mitchell Baker, who has led Mozilla since it was spun out of the Netscape browser project. Mozilla can’t bring its full browser technology to iOS, Windows Phone, and Windows RT, and people do things with native apps on mobile device that they might do with a Web browser on a PC.

“The stage we’re in with mobile devices — with different hardware, software, and user experience — is much more closed. It’s lacking many of the freedoms of the Web,” Baker said. “In the mobile space, we have less impact, and more computing time is moving in that direction.”

The bulk of Mozilla’s funds come from search-ad revenue shared by partners including Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Amazon, and eBay. “Most of that is from Google,”

Nearly one in four netizens are using outdated web browsers and are therefore easy pickings for viruses and exploit-wielding crooks.

Firefox users tend to be the worst for keeping up to date with new software releases, according to the survey by security biz Kaspersky Lab. The proportion of users with the most recent version installed was 80.2 per cent for Internet Explorer and 79.2 per cent for Chrome, but just 66.1 per cent for Firefox.

“Our new research paints an alarming picture. While most users make a switch to the most recent browser within a month of the update, there will still be around a quarter of users who have not made the transition. That means millions of potentially vulnerable machines, constantly attacked using new and well-known web-born threats.”

Members of the Electronic Frontier Foundation have updated their popular HTTPS Everywhere browser plugin to offer automatic Web encryption to an additional 1,500 sites, twice as many as previously offered.

A previous update to HTTPS Everywhere introduced an optional feature known as the Decentralized SSL Observatory. It detects and warns about possible man-in-the-middle attacks on websites a user is visiting. It works by sending a copy of the site’s SSL certificate to the EFF’s SSL Observatory. When EFF detects anomalies, it sends a warning to affected end users.