Mozilla has canceled developing 64-bit Firefox for Windows

People who have been waiting patiently for Mozilla to launch a version of Firefox made especially for 64-bit versions of Windows looks like they may be waiting forever. Mozilla Engineering Manager Benjamin Smedberg has apparently made the decision to kill off development of the 64-bit Windows version of the popular web browser.

In a post on the Bugzilla development page written on Wednesday, Smedberg states, "Please stop building windows 64 builds and tests." He outlined his feelings on the matter in an earlier post on a Google Groups development board. Some of the reasons deal with plug-in issues, with Smedberg saying, "Many plugins are not available in 64-bit versions." He added, "The plugins that are available don’t work correctly in Firefox because we haven’t implemented things like windowproc hooking, which means that hangs are more common."

With development of a Windows 64-bit version of Firefox now halted, it looks like Windows users now have just Internet Explorer and Opera that support native 64-bit web browser versions for Microsoft's platform. While Microsoft continues to release both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows, the trend in the last few years has been for Windows owners to get the 64-bit SKU.

Tags: mozilla / firefox / 64-bit /