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
√ Release automation for Aurora and Beta
√ 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
√ Temporarily Reinstated Support for Silverlight bug 1225293

Next Steps

  1. Prioritize Stub Installer to help release automation testing and for download/install experience for our users, see: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1140411#c7
  2. Crash-Stats for Win64: decide if not having separate crashes/hADI rates or the tooling for creating them and simply working with KaiRo to query for 64bit-build-specific crashes is sustainable
  3. Decide what the criteria (mainly plugins and add-ons) is for an auto-detect install experience for Dev Edition for pages such as: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/
  4. Decide what the criteria is for Beta (we can cut a beta at any time, this is just about actually releasing it)
  5. Decide what the criteria is for GA
  6. We really need a Product Marketing point of contact to help us with GTM

Proposed Roll Out Plan (as of Q1 2015)

Status Installer Payload Release Channel Date Target Audience Plugin Status Addon Status Notes
[DONE] Full Installer Firefox 38 Dev Edition Launched Feb 27th 1% Developers and Gamers 64-Bit Flash (unsupported) Add-On Compat = clean slate Available for language repacks only! Found, here so it's truly an opt-in experience. NB: Moz.org button displayed on the main Dev Edition page and the beta 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.
[PROPOSED] Full Installer Firefox 39 Dev Edition Launch April 3 1% Developers and Gamers 64-Bit Flash (unsupported) Add-On Compat = clean slate Available for language repacks only, found here same reason as above.
[PROPOSED] Stub Installer Firefox 40 Dev Edition Launch May 12 1% Developers and Gamers + New Users without legacy binary plugins and addons? 64-Bit Flash (unsupported?) Add-On Compat for top non-malware addons = Outreach Begins Need to decide if auto-detect (not opt-in) is ok or if we need Moz.org team to modify functionality for https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/.
[PROPOSED] Stub Installer Firefox 41 Dev Edition Launch June 30 1% Developers and Gamers + 1% Developers and Gamers + New Users without legacy binary plugins and addons, Existing Users 64-Bit Flash (unsupported?) EME? Add-On Compat = testing Need to decide if it can ride trains to beta
[PROPOSED] Stub Installer Firefox 41 Beta Launch August 11, first release of Q3 Beta Audience What plugin compat do we need for Beta? EME? Add-On Compat = testing Need to decide if it can ride trains to GA
[PROPOSED] Universal Installer TBD TBD TBD TBD TBD TBD

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Team Contacts

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
EPM/Subject Matter Expert Chris Peterson
Add Ons Jorge Villalobos