Firefox/win64

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Firefox Desktop: Win64

See background summary, market analysis, goals and objectives, here.

Goal

To Release Win64 in GA before the end of 2015 (?) in order to offer our users better experience with improvements in stability, performance, and security. Deliver these benefits in a phased roll-out and avoid the breakage for our General Audience. This means opt-in only until we are confident that we have achieved parity with Win32 for our users.

What have we accomplished so far to reach it?

√ Solved test bustage
√ Merged to Nightly prior to the 10th anniversary launch and rode the trains to Firefox 38 Aurora Developer Edition
√ Win64 builds are currently available, here

Next Steps (as of Q1 2015)

Installer Payload	Release Channel	Target Audience	Date	Notes
Full Installer	Firefox 38 Dev Edition	1% Developers and Gamers	Launched Feb 27th	Available for language repacks only found, here so it's truly an opt-in experience. Why? Moz.org button displayed on the main Dev Edition page doesn't offer Win32 and Win64 in parallel, it auto detects so the user can't install Win64 and revert to Win32 should they want to.
Stub Installer	Firefox 38 Dev Edition	Launch Date TBD

Our Users & Go-To Market Plan

Speaker: Javaun Moradi

64 bit is incredibly exciting to those of us who understand what it offers in stability, performance, and security. We're the minority. Most of the world has no idea what 64 bit means. They can already do everything they want to do online. Many will only notice 64 bit if their experience breaks. Our job is to deliver the benefits -- even if they're invisible -- and avoid the breakage.

Who is the user, and what problem do we aim to solve for them?

• Early adopters: 1%-ish Power users (gamers, developers, security folks, high memory users, etc) who know what 64 bit is and why they want it
• Everyone else:
  • Users who don't use plugins or binary add-ons and aren't at risk if we drop support
  • Users who have plugins/add-ons that may break in 64

Games industry focus: We need to show them that we’re launching 64 so that they see we’re serious, it’s coming, and they can start planning to ship games for this ecosystem (browser based games). This aligns with our objective #1. We largely suspect an announcement alone satisfies the games folks. A limited rollout to the 1% satisfies this market need and would allow them to start working.

Clean Slate Approach

We have a chance to clean house. We recommend stopping support for most plugins. We must support Flash and Silverlight use cases, especially for streaming video. We recommend retiring binary add-on support entirely. This will wipe away a lot of browser hijacking, instability, and malware. We should reach out to top add-on developers with advance notice of our intentions. Additionally, many ESR users also rely on binary add-ons. We should broach this idea with them as well.

Go to Market

• We'll first launch with an opt-in (new download) targeting the 1%. This puts us in the game and satisfies game developer needs.
• Limited roll out will help us gauge overall benefits in speed, stability and security and inform our decision for updating mainstream users.
• Users without legacy binary add-ons and old plugins have the next easiest migration to 64 bit.
• Auto-update for all users will be necessary at some point, but with maximum care to avoiding breakage for those running old plugins or binary add-ons.

Issues & Risks

Speaker: All

• Are we sure that Gamers will be ok without Flash support for the first rev?
• We don't know if 64-bit Flash will be more stable than 32-bit Flash. If we ship and stability takes a nose dive, we need a mitigation plan.

Backlog

No results.

0 Total; 0 Open (0%); 0 Resolved (0%); 0 Verified (0%);

Role	Contact
Product Management (Decision Maker)	Javaun Moradi
Product Manager, Platform	Martin Best
Firefox Engineering (Decision Maker)	Benjamin Smedburg
Firefox Installer Engineering	Robert Strong
Release Management	Lawrence Mandel
Release Engineering	Chris Atlee
Quality Engineering (Decision Maker)	Robert Kaiser
Engineering Program Management	Erin Lancaster
Add Ons	Jorge Villalobos