Mozilla, or rather the Firefox team, is facing a somewhat unusual problem that is holding up development in some cases. Firefox can't reliably be compiled because the linker runs out of virtual address space. The problem stems from the fact that Firefox is built on 32-bit machines which can only access a limited amount of memory even with larger amounts of physical memory.

Each new release of Mozilla’s Firefox brings improved performance to this popular open-source web browser. But despite these welcome tweaks, Firefox remains hobbled in one major respect: it’s resolutely 32-bit.

Takeaway: If you visit the Firefox website and download the build for Linux, you will receive a 32-bit version of the browser. For someone trying to avoid compatibility libraries, there has to be another way — and there is.

Adobe has announced the release of Flash Player 11, the latest big update to its popular platform. The headliner for this release is Adobe's hardware accelerated 3D technology, dubbed Stage 3D, which will enable developers to create much more powerful and great-looking games on Flash.

New version! - Adobe® Flash® Player 11 desktop beta drives innovation for rich, engaging digital experiences with new features for cross-platform browser-based viewing of expressive rich internet applications, content, and videos across devices. Some of the features from the Flash Player Incubator, such as Stage 3D and 64-bit support, have been moved into this beta release.

To speed browsing on computers with 64-bit processors and operating systems, Mozilla released the first 64-bit version of Firefox, Firefox 4.0, in 2010. Unfortunately, Adobe Flash Player was not immediately available in a final 64-bit version, and when the 32-bit version is installed, browsing to a page containing Flash content can result in an error message in Firefox. However, there are workarounds that can help you to use Firefox and Flash together.

‪buggy firefox flash ubuntu 11.04 64bit‬‏ - YouTube

Over the last couple of weeks, Mozilla has finally stepped up its 64-bit testing process. There are now five slaves dedicated to building Firefox for Windows x64, which means that from Firefox 8 and onwards, you’ll be able to pick up 64-bit builds that are functionally identical to its 32-bit cousins but operating in native 64-bit CPU and memory space.

Mozilla has begun collecting feedback on what appears to be a more serious approach to move Firefox for Windows from 32 to 64 bit.

Firefox product manager Asa Dotzler determined that figuring out the 64-bit confusion surrounding Firefox it will be “near the top” of his to-do list this summer and fall. One could conclude that Mozilla has no idea at this point what people are expecting from a 64-bit version of Firefox, so Dotzler is asking for some feedback. Considering the advantages and disadvantages of 64-bit – are you ready for a 64-bit Firefox?

A very early development milestone of Firefox 8 proves that Mozilla continues to keep alive its plans to provide a native x64 version of its opens source browser for 64-bit flavors of Windows, including Windows 7. I told you earlier this month that Mozilla had made available the first taste of Firefox 8 via its Nightly Channel.

I'm collecting information on what people expect from and are concerned about with a 64-bit Firefox build for Win64 users. So far I've heard "improved performance" and "better security" in the pro column and "download confusion", "plug-in availability", and "memory footprint" in the con column.

This is *not* an official build of Firefox, it was not built by Mozilla. If you want things like Flash and Java, you will need to install 64-bit versions of them. If you install this version of Firefox, do not ask Mozilla or anyone else for support for it, this is for private usage and testing *only* If you provide this to any other party, or place on any medium where there is the demonstrable intent to make available to a third party then you must include this notice verbatim.

Flash Player for 64-bit Web Browsers

So it has been a little over week since I started using Firefox 4 Beta 13pre (64-Bit). This evening I was trying to read an article in Wikipedia but there appeared to be an issue with the character encoding. I switched the encoding from Unicode (UTF-8) to Western (ISO-8859-1) which fixed the issue for a moment but then reverted back to the Unicode encoding (although Western was still selected).