Chrome For Mac Drops 32-bit Build 129
jones_supa writes Google has revealed that it's launching the finished 64-bit version of Chrome 39 for OS X this November, which already brought benefits in speed, security and stability on Windows. However at this point the 32-bit build for Mac will cease to exist. Just to make it clear, this decision does not apply to Windows and Linux builds, at least for now. As a side effect, 32-bit NPAPI plugins will not work on Chrome on Mac version 39 onwards. The affected hardware are only the very first x86-based Macs with Intel Core Duo processors. An interesting question remains, whether the open source version of Chrome, which is of course Chromium, could still be compiled for x86-32 on OS X.
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
They're trying to force others to adopt their own PPAPI, in the most heavy-handed way possible. Because once they do, other browser vendors will have no choice but to adopt it. All in the name of our "security". It's almost glorious. Soon there will be no need to pretend that the web is an open place driven by many voices.
It's not Google's fault. It's Mozilla's. (Score:5, Insightful)
As much as I hate Chrome, and although I refuse to use Google's offerings (including their search engine), I can't blame them for doing what they're doing. Everyone should expect them to act in a way that will further their interests.
If anyone is to blame, I think it should be Mozilla. Firefox had 35% of the market a few years ago. They provided real competition to IE and the other browsers. But then once Chrome started making some inroads, mostly by drawing away IE 6 users, the Mozilla devs went stupid and decided to clone Chrome in every respect.
We now live with the outcome that resulted from these awful decisions. Firefox is now just a poor imitation of Chrome, offering almost no original functionality. Firefox has become unusable for many people, especially those of us who dislike Chrome's philosophy of how a browser should act and behave. None of these changes have brought any new users to Firefox. Firefox is still slower and more bloated than its competitors. And because of all of these factors, users have had to leave Firefox for a better browsing experience elsewhere. Even IE 11 is providing people a better browsing experience than Firefox is for many people these days, as awful as that sounds.
Now that Firefox has less than 10% of the browser market, it has basically no influence over how the other more dominant browser developers have to act. Google, Microsoft and Apple don't have to give a fuck what Mozilla and its users want, because there are comparatively so few of them.
It didn't have to be this way. A few years ago, Mozilla could have kept developing Firefox with an independent mindset. Instead of cloning Chrome, Firefox could have continually improved the browsing experience. Its performance could have been improved, and its memory usage decreased, instead of its UI being trashed. It could have been a browser that perhaps 30% to 40% of users use. Chrome, rather than getting all of these Firefox refugees, would itself only have perhaps 30% to 40% of the market, instead of almost totally dominating it like it does today. IE would be less significant of a player than it is today.
Nobody forced Mozilla to make the stupid decisions that they did. In fact, a lot of Firefox users very vocally said, "No! We don't like that!" time and time again, release after release. But Mozilla didn't want to listen. Mozilla did everything in their power to ruin the Firefox experience. And now the entire web has to suffer.
Re:It's not Google's fault. It's Mozilla's. (Score:5, Interesting)
You're just whining about minor cosmetic changes. The reason why Firefox lost share is because for a long time it was much slower at JavaScript, it had memory leaks, the interface would freeze when doing anything, pages didn't render quickly, and so on. None of that was something that Mozilla could easily fix because it was baked into the DNA of the browser.
They have put in the hard work to fix these things. Regular JavaScript in Firefox is as fast or faster than in Chrome and asm.js is much faster in Firefox. Memory leaks are almost all gone. The interface freezes sometimes, but not nearly as much. Pages render much faster.
The real problem for Firefox is not the interface changes that people like you whine about, it's mobile. Now 30% of traffic is mobile and Firefox doesn't have an app for any Apple mobile devices and is effectively excluded from Android by Google's Microsoft-like illegal anti-competitive licensing deals with manufacturers (you can get the app, but it's not preloaded and only a few geeks ever would). They're also up against a massive advertising campaign, with every Google property having a huge pop-up like ad telling users to use Chrome. Chrome users don't see this, but Google is doing everything they can except adding the words "or else".
Mozilla is doing a great job with Firefox, but they are up against a billions-dollar corporation that has set its sights on owning all the means to access the web that is spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year and is willing to break the fair competition laws to do so.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I keep hearing that Firefox is supposedly "faster" than Chrome, but any time I've tried the latest version of the two on the same system Firefox is always obviously slower. It doesn't matter if it's Windows or OS X or Linux. Chrome feels zippy and fast and light. Firefox lags and makes me wait and wastes my computer's memory. Show me cockamamie microbenchmarks if you must, but for real world usage I do not think that Firefox is anywhere comparable to Chrome. I know it, the market knows it, and that's why Ch
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Mozilla is "doing a great job with Firefox"? Huh?
Let's look at the facts:
- The Firefox UI changes are far more than just "minor cosmetic changes". They totally ruin the user experience for many users. For others, they just make Firefox harder to use efficiently.
- Firefox is still slower than Chrome and even IE these days.
- Firefox still uses more memory than Chrome and even IE these days.
- Firefox on Android is rather bad, and has very few users.
- Firefox on iOS isn't even an option.
- Firefox OS is crippled
Re: (Score:2)
Firefox on Android is really quite good. I use it all the time.
Re: (Score:2)
- Firefox on iOS isn't even an option.
And this is the fault of Mozilla how, exactly? Apple doesn't allow alternative rendering engines in the App Store, should Mozilla dedicate resources to just jailbreakers?
Re: (Score:2)
Mozilla has their own billion dollar corporation, Samsung: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]
You can't use the product yet but there is major potential there for a Rust based high speed engine built from the ground up for parallelism. They could very easily lag the competition for the next couple of years then leapfrog them.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know if you are reading this but that's interesting. Why would Servo use C and C++? The whole idea for Rust I thought was parallelism.
Re: (Score:3)
Mozilla have not paid enough attention to the things that make Firefox unique. The add-on API has been neglected and many useful ones no longer work and the authors have no intention of updating them. Why don't Mozilla adopt and fix the popular ones? Why not clean up and improve the APIs to offer a bit of security?
Unique features like tab groups have been abandoned, and I think that particular one is slated to go away at some point. They say no-one uses it but that's because no-one knows it's there. Perform
Re: (Score:2)
I'll beg to differ: the real problem for day to day use is the freezing. It's been unusable for at least the past year.
Re: (Score:2)
The real problem for Firefox is not the interface changes that people like you whine about, it's mobile. Now 30% of traffic is mobile and Firefox doesn't have an app for any Apple mobile devices and is effectively excluded from Android by Google's Microsoft-like illegal anti-competitive licensing deals with manufacturers (you can get the app, but it's not preloaded and only a few geeks ever would).
Huh? It's in the Google Play Market and is no harder to install than any other app. Once it's installed, the first time you click on a link from another app you're asked to choose the app that will handle links. I fall into the geek category (and so installed it from F-Droid, not Google Play), but found it trivial to switch to Firefox on the mobile. I mostly did because Chrome has spectacularly bad cookie management and I'd been trying to find a browser that did it better. Early Firefox ports were as b
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
His argument is that Chrome comes pre-installed and therefore requires less effort to use. Since it doesn't give the average user a reason to complain, nobody bothers looking for a browser.
It's the same 'How IE preinstalls killed Netscape' argument.
Re: (Score:2)
They're also up against a massive advertising campaign, with every Google property having a huge pop-up like ad telling users to use Chrome. Chrome users don't see this, but Google is doing everything they can except adding the words "or else".
Oh we see what Google is doing with Chrome. Actually, you are right on the money when you say the reason Firefox lost because of mobile. But that isn't all - I want to use Firefox , but Chrome gives an unparalleled feature set - the sync, the integration, the modern extension architechture, the apps, Dart, etc. etc., along with speed. Firefox simply did not ship fast enough the innovative, and when they did, they were always following Chrome.
Also, single-threaded-ness is killing Firefox. Even when the page
Re: (Score:1)
Also, single-threaded-ness is killing Firefox. Even when the page renders nearly as fast as Chrome, every UI action like opening a new tab is slower in Firefox. At this point, Mozilla would do better to just fork Chromium and strip it of its Googlization.
Because that's worked so well for Opera, right?
Opera on mobile went form being a lean, fast, good browser to a clunky pile of shit after it decided to be a Chrome reskin instead. Lost all its useful features, too. As for desktop I wouldn't even know, the newer versions aren't even available for me on Linux currently.
We need more browser implementations and rendering engines, not fewer. We're on a fast track to a repeat of the dark days of the Internet Explorer 4-6 monopoly right now.
Re: (Score:2)
In other words pretty much exactly what some tried to say when Google first launched Chrome, except for OSS zealots who were blinded by their Mozilla support and "do no evil" slogan.
For Google open source is not a goal, it's a tool. Google funded Mozilla to run a browser war by proxy, as an open source and non-profit organization Mozilla could get massive support from organizations and volunteers that Google never could and a much higher tolerance of bugs and broken functionality. And I mean that both with
Re: (Score:2)
What you say is true, but the consequences of MSIE domination are quite different than Chrome's. MSIE's purpose was to defeat or delay the cross-platform nature of the web - until such time as MS figured out how to compete with it. Just as MS-Java's purpose was to defeat the cross-platform nature of Java, and C# was their attempt to render Java irrelevant - as if having 'the best' Windows-only language were the point in the first place. Chrome may want to absorb everything in it's path, but it's purpose
Re: (Score:2)
You're just whining about minor cosmetic changes.
NO!
He is bringing legitimate usability problems to light. I did not stop recommending Firefox to friends and relatives because of slow javascript performance. I stopped recommending it because it became less usable. It is people like me who spread Firefox so widely. In fact, I am personally responsible for over 100 thousand people being able to use Firefox on their work computers. Granted, I would not have been able to push it over the top if others had not already pushed it up as a possibility... but,
Very
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Re: (Score:1)
More like "The North Remembers!".
"Direfox! King in the North!"
vs
"Steve Ballmer sends his regards"
Re: (Score:2)
Now there's very little time at all before the interface becomes useable, even without enabling "Electrolysis". Although I keep trying to test multi-threaded, but it breaks LastPass, RequestPolicyContinued and probably some other things
Addenum: FF is nothing like Chrome (Score:2)
Even IE allows for some pretty major GUI surgery with BrowserHelpers, and extensions. I use Quero for IE, and hide the "native address-bar".
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed. But the Chrome philosophy is different and more suited to Google's needs as a web company : they give you minimal UI , and the GUI you use to do the actual work is the UI of the webapp.
They turned the the browser into something like the Windows Taskbar - not very customizable, just a basic way to load the useful stuff. ChromeOS is the ultimate realization of this.
Re: (Score:2)
Whereas FF is far and away the MOST customizable
Mozilla are working hard to "fix" this though. It's not even as customizable as its own previous versions.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure the primary reason for getting rid of the "Addon Bar" and such is to break legacy usage of shit extensions that aren't secure, haven't maintained development, and in many cases are no longer necessary. There are so many garbage extensions in the online addons repository, it's not even funny. Hundreds of addons that do one stupid thing, that USERSTYLES can do or that FF already does natively. Yet people still download and install them. Hil
Re: (Score:2)
When multi-threading gets more stable, they'll have smoked Opera in every way imaginable.
And for the people that wont give up their legacy-shit-extensions, you can add back the Status-bar/Addon-bar and live in the past to ones hearts content.
Re: (Score:1)
Nobody forced Mozilla to make the stupid decisions that they did. In fact, a lot of Firefox users very vocally said, "No! We don't like that!" time and time again, release after release. But Mozilla didn't want to listen. Mozilla did everything in their power to ruin the Firefox experience. And now the entire web has to suffer.
Opera did the same thing. I still like Opera 12.x. But I prefer Chrome to the newer, Chromium based, versions of Opera. And the problem is that Opera 12.x is doomed in the long run.
Re: (Score:2)
As far as I know, NPAPI plugins can't be sandboxed effectively. So they are indeed security risks. You could argue whether it is Google or the end user that should decide what risks to take with plugins, but given how easily people click "Yes" without even reading the question, I don't really blame them for not leaving this to the end user.
As for an open web, what did plugins ever do to open the web? The most popular plug-in is Flash, which is proprietary. Silverlight is proprietary; it has an open source c
Re: (Score:2)
Good Riddance!
Chrome is handy for 'legacy' content but for flash's main deployment - videos, for day to day use, the HTML5 player in Firefox on Linux works well enough.
Re: (Score:2)
Requirements ? (Score:1)
Switching to 64 bit builds means that they will have to drop OSX 10.6, right? It's about time this one is left behind!
Re:Requirements ? (Score:5, Informative)
Switching to 64 bit builds means that they will have to drop OSX 10.6, right? It's about time this one is left behind!
No, 64 bit builds run on 10.6 just fine. You may be confused here: 10.7 requires a 64 bit processor. So if you don't support 10.6, then supporting 32 bit is pointless - anything running 10.7 upwards supports 64 bit.
What isn't supported anymore is machines with 32 bit processor.
Re: (Score:3)
Switching to 64 bit builds means that they will have to drop OSX 10.6, right? It's about time this one is left behind!
No, 64 bit builds run on 10.6 just fine. You may be confused here: 10.7 requires a 64 bit processor. So if you don't support 10.6, then supporting 32 bit is pointless - anything running 10.7 upwards supports 64 bit.
But there is also the corner case of machines like I have with a 64 bit capable CPU but only 32 bit EFI for which I am endlessly trapped on Lion (10.7). Which probably doesn't count in this case, but is always a source of endless bitching for me.
Re: (Score:2)
The choice is yours. Upgrade or die.
I would .. but..
I am not going to buy a sealed-in iMac or MacBook, I can't afford a Mac Pro and I am hanging out for a new Mac Mini model (and have been for 12 months)
Re: (Score:3)
Good news everyone, the new Mac mini is almost certainly coming [macrumors.com] (and has been since december 7th, 2013).
Re: (Score:2)
I thought they already announced it [apple.com]. Even added a free cell phone radio!
Re: (Score:1)
I run a MacPro 1,1 at work. Upgraded it with more memory, an SSD, and a new graphics card, and it's still a pretty darn sweet system.
You actually can run Mountain Lion and Mavericks on a 32-bit EFI computer. People are even running Yosemite on older computers. Check out the thread here:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1740775
I probably will upgrade at some point. It's nice to not feel trapped, at the very least.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Its obvious that worshiping has gotten in the way of reading.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Thanks for the explanation!
So it means they will be supporting only 64bit machines on 10.6, and there's probably few of them since they are likely to have upgraded to newer versions of OSX, unlike all the 32bit machines that are stuck on 10.6 and that should make the majority of 10.6 users. Am I right?
As someone with a white macbook... (Score:2)
Re:As someone with a white macbook... (Score:5, Funny)
Considering the stable is currently at version 37, you still have about 4 weeks. Surely, 4 weeks is enough to buy a Chromebook, no? *evil grin*
Re: (Score:1)
Why buy a Chromebook when you can pick up an unwanted one from any garbage heap?
Re: (Score:2)
Plenty of time to switch to Firefox. Probably they'll keep offering 32-bit for a while yet, and when they stop a third-party project will come along that will, a la TenFourFox.
And this is why Open Source is goodness (Score:2)
Plenty of time to switch to Firefox. Probably they'll keep offering 32-bit for a while yet, and when they stop a third-party project will come along that will, a la TenFourFox.
All hail open source - Chrome is not (completely) open source, Firefox is. Google doesn't want or care if you want 64bit (or don't want it).
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair, there's Chromium (entirely OSS) and maybe someone will care enough to distribute a 32-bit Mac binary.
Re: (Score:3)
Being that your 32bit Macbooks are 8 years old.
You really should expect to not get much updates in any software what so ever.
I am surprised that Google had 32bit mac support.
The ones I witnessed... (Score:1)
8 to 16: Z80 to 8088 (8-bits in memory access, but kinda mixed 8- and 16-bits internally... but the 286 was 16-bit, anyway)
Got confused by that brain damaged paginated-memory scheme.
16 to 32: after a long struggle against abandoning 16-bit and Windows 3.11 (which I paid for), it seemed I was doomed to buy Win98.
Alas, Linux saved the day and I could avoid '98 and flip it at M$.
32 to 64: still happening over here... I thought I'd be able to just use 64 this year, then realized my 2GB computers get a little le
Re: (Score:2)
We don't have enough atoms in the solar system to max out a 64bit address space.
You would need to consume an entire galaxy to build a RAM chip big enough.
But maybe I'm wrong...
Maxing out the universe... (Score:2)
The universe is plenty big enough. 2^64 is about 1.8x10^19 and there are around 10^59 atoms in just one average-sized star. That leaves 5.5x10^39 atoms per bit. That's a lot of atoms; a lot more than a trillion kilograms, in fact.
The universe is really, really big..
Re: (Score:2)
Crap, I got my 10^ and 2^ mixed up.
I'll go hide under a rock now.
Re: (Score:2)
You noticed one problem below. But there is another one. IPv6 addresses are 128 bits not 64 bits. They are (2^64)^2 in size. 2^64 is the size of a IPv6 subnet. Now the universe is still about 10^80 atoms so you still have 2.9e41 atoms per address. So your main point that the original poster was wrong about the relative size still holds.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:It did? (Score:5, Informative)
Here is a post [chromium.org] from the Chromium Blog that explains how 64 bit improves Chrome. Incidentally this applies to software generally, not just Chrome. The key part of the post that explains the expected improvements:
64-bit Chrome has become faster as a result of having access to a superior instruction set, more registers, and a more efficient function calling convention. Improved opportunities for ASLR enhance this version’s security. Another major benefit of this change comes from the fact that most programs on a modern Mac are already 64-bit apps. In cases where Chrome was the last remaining 32-bit app, there were launch-time and memory-footprint penalties as 32-bit copies of all of the system libraries needed to be loaded to support Chrome. Now that Chrome’s a 64-bit app too, we expect you’ll find that it launches more quickly and that overall system memory use decreases.
While you may appear to be using more RAM because the 64 bit Chrome processes are larger than the 32 bit, the net memory usage should be the same or less because 64 bit Chrome will not pull the 32 bit stack into RAM to operate. ASLR is a security technique that mitigates vulnerabilities that appear in applications and libraries; lack of a form of ASLR is among the reasons Heartbleed became a thing.
So stop quibbling and use modern software. If you are experiencing a RAM shortage — as opposed to obsessing needlessly over monitoring tools and being difficult — then get more RAM or use a less demanding browser; Chrome use more resources than its contemporaries and makes no apologies for it.
Re: (Score:2)
He already found a solution, he's not going to follow your hostile advice.
He found a "solution" which may lead to him becoming a shuffling zombie. It's in no one's best interest to defend that.
Re:It did? (Score:5, Funny)
What about the people who exploit bugs after they're been disclosed and fixed? They're people too!
If no one stayed on old unsupported software, that entire industry would collapse. Think of the job losses all over Romania, Russia and Nigeria.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is the new xcode will soon drop support for the 32 bit versions of the OS and for some reason, mac developers can't figure out how to make a fat binary that runs on everything from about 10.0.0 to 10.11.00 even thought it requires having 3 versions of X code running on two or 3 different (virtual?) machines and then copying a few files. It is amazing how many open source packages just compile with older version of Xcode if you add in a few #DEFINES for things that aren't used anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
Never trust anything that can't spit out a Makefile, or equivalent.
Re: (Score:2)
Running this version of Chrome requires that I install a new OS which means that I need to back up all of my application settings spread out across the entire system, install the new OS, and then try to put all of the pieces together again. And that's if the new OS supports my old hardware. So it's not as easy as you make it out to be unless you're willing to pay for my new hardware.
Re: (Score:1)
I will get a machine with at least 32 GB of RAM.
This one have 8 GB.
And it's a Windows 8.1 machine not a mac. I think I said that. Possibly not just giving general experience what do I know.
I don't know whatever it support 32 bit plugins and whatever my bankid plugin is 32 bit and whatever that could increase the memory load more.
My feel for it was that it used more RAM at least.
About time (Score:2)
As browsers become more and more app platform engines it is essential to use cpu instructions included after the Pentium IV in this day and age. It is 2014 and 10 years is enough. XP is the sole reason 32 bit is still around.
Yes if it aint broke don't fix it became a conservative motto here with the nerds who are approaching middle age now, but the web is still evolving and HTML 5 and HTML 5.1 will include WebGL, more AJAX, and other things where a not just additional memory addresses but also cpu instructi
intel atom systems keep 32 bit systems around (Score:2)
intel atom systems keep 32 bit systems around longer then they should of been. Windows 8 should of been the end of 32bit windows.
Windows Server 2008 R2 was first 64-bit-only operating system released from Microsoft
Re: (Score:2)
Then have both.
Unlike 16 bit to 32 bit it most simply is a recompile about 90% of the time unless you have assembly or something specific. My guess is the ugly Netscape API for the plugins which Chrome used to support until last year and of course Firefox is built upon this.
Newer atoms anyway are 64 bit. In the old days this would have been obsoleted in 3 years. I would have laughed at you in 2004 if you told me most things are still 32 bit 10 years from now. XP is still freaking alive too in a few places.
Re:intel atom systems keep 32 bit systems around (Score:5, Funny)
Dude, 1994 wasn't 20 years... oh crap, I'm old.
Get off my lawn!
Re: (Score:2)
You stole the UID from your nephew, grandpa?
Re: (Score:2)
IPv6 traffic is increasing exponentially and we are already up to 4.42% ( http://www.google.com/intl/en/... [google.com] ) . My money is IPv6 is the majority of all traffic by the end of 2018 and likely during 2017.
Re: (Score:1)
Let me help you out with that: http://xkcd.com/605/ [xkcd.com]
Of course, time will tell whether you're correct. I doubt it, though. ISPs are digging in with carrier grade NAT and other hacks.
It's like the x86 ISA... every time someone comes up with a new, improved ISA it loses to someone else who just puts another bag on the bag on the bag on the side of x86. When will ARM triumph and supplant x86? Before or after the heat death of the universe?
Re: (Score:2)
I would have laughed at you in 1994 if you told me most things are still 32 bit 20 years from now.
So... do you expect CPUs to be 128-bit in 2024?
Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if we stuck with 64-bit for a very long time. At least with respect to address space, it seems unlikely that we're going to have devices with tens of exbibytes of RAM. Or even addressable persistent storage which is touched enough that it's worthwhile having a flat address space.
2^64 is a really big number. 16 EiB = 16,384 PiB = 16,777,216 TiB = 17,179,869,184 GiB. I mean, yeah, Moore's Law and all, but even in a world wh
Re: (Score:1)
In 1994, we already had 64-bit CPUs in the server and professional workstation spaces, and the benefits were clear.
Going past 64-bit CPUs, the advantages are not so obvious, and much of the effort is being expended on changing the game to quantum computing.
Re: (Score:2)
Give Apple time, they have ARMv8 hardware shipping since late last year.
They'll soon enough release versions of iOS that only run on their A7 or higher.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, Java in a Real Browser in OSX (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
independent support (Score:3)
Why would there be any question that Chromium could still be compiled for 32-bit CPUs? It it's open-source, it can be. The only question is whether anyone cares enough to do it.
The Firefox devs walked away from PPC processors some time ago, but there's enough interest in that platform that an independent fork of its code [floodgap.com] has been maintained.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
So I guess your eyes glossed over before you got the part where I talked about how someone is still maintaining current releases of Firefox to run on the original iMac (from the 20th century)?
For the other 70+% of us (Score:2)
Windows 64Bit: Stable version 37 is currently available as an opt-in:
https://www.google.com/chrome/... [google.com]