As expected Mozilla has now unveiled the Developer Edition of 64-bit Firefox for Windows (v 38). The 64-bit build allows users to get a more richer, desktop-quality app experience in the web-browser, the 64bit version of the browser allows running of larger applications, better performance, and increased security vs it's 32bit sibling.

As blogged earlier after Internet Explorer and Google Chrome, our beloved Firefox web-browser is also coming with multi-process support. To make things even sweeter Mozilla has also announced an official 64bit version of the web-browser for Windows OS, although this was unofficially available as Waterfox.

Internet Explorer 8 was the very first web-browser to utilize separate processes followed by Google Chrome, the separation of UI and multiple “content” processes to host web-content results in better security and performance. Using separate content processes allows them to be properly sandboxed enhancing security and will also result in better UI responsiveness as the browser UI would not be affected by poor performance of content processes.

Although the underlying Gecko platform on which Firefox runs supports multiple processes, the Firefox frontend is not designed to use them. Work to make the frontend support multiple processes began in early 2013, and fruits of the work are now available in Nightly builds of the browser. The new multi-process Firefox will make it a more stable web-browser, a crash in “content” process will not kill the entire browser and will show something like below telling which tab crashed allowing them to be reloaded.

While there is no x64 Bit build of "Google Chrome", in my quest to look for a performance oriented 64bit native web-browser I found variations of "Mozilla Firefox" specifically optimized and compiled for 64 Bit Windows OS. Both WaterFox and PaleMoon forks features an x64 optimized firefox version for download, but since WaterFox optimizations are "only targeted" towards 64bit systems I tested Firefox x86 (32 Bit) Vs WaterFox x64 and the results are as follows.

In my quest to get the fastest possible experience with our beloved Firefox web-browser here we have another trick to get upto 2x faster start-up of Firefox on Windows OS, Firefox addon "Start Faster" does exactly what it's name suggests making use of some clever tinkering with core OS "prefetch" functionality to make the web-browser loading time faster.

Firefox Load Time Before Using "Start Faster"

We want our web-browsers to be as fast as possible, we have shared tips on various optimizations aiming to make Firefox faster like the CPU optimized Pale Moon Project, SpeedyFox, Firefox memory optimizers and BarTab.

Today we have another nifty little tool which optimizes your Firefox install by removing unwanted language files from Extensions making start-up faster.

Firefox has been my web-browser of choice thanks to the stable performance and customization possibilities it offers, in the quest for having a faster web-browsing experience with Firefox I had tried reducing tab-overload, optimize memory usage and even trying an CPU optimized version. SpeedyFox is yet another free utility which promises to make your Firefox start-up upto 3 times faster with faster loading of browsing history and operations with Cookies.

What SpeedyFox does is that it optimizes fragmented SQLITE database files which are used to store your Firefox data resulting in faster overall experience.

The biggest advantage of open-source software is that developers are free to make changes to existing code and create completely customized version of the software, benefiting from the same "Project Pale Moon" is making Firefox faster by upto 25% on Windows platform by removing unwanted code (for most users) and optimizing it to benefit from latest CPU features making full use of enhanced instruction sets of newer CPUs.

To achieve it's faster Firefox build goal "Pale Moon" disables features like ActiveX and ActiveX scripting, Accessibility features, Parental controls, Javascript debugging support, crashreporter and automatic updater by design. Also, do note that since "Pale Moon Browser" is specifically optimized for current processor generation that is 7th or later generation CPU with SSE2 support the browser will not run or will have problems on older hardware configurations.