Christmas at Opera Labs: 64-bit Opera, and out-of-process plug-ins

Taken from: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/64-bit-opera-and-out-of-process-plug-ins/

 

Now that Chrome is the only browser without 64bit support maybe they'll finally prioritize it.

 

Thanks guest. I was reading about this on another forum. Glad to see Opera go 64-bit.

 

64-bit is the future; actually you can use them right now if you don't mind betas.

 

I would like to try Opera 64 bit, but I will wait until it is out of beta. In fact, I may wait longer than that.

 

I didn't think that they had any plans for 64 bit Chrome. I'll believe 64 bit Firefox when I see it.

 

Good idea, the one from labs is actually pre-alpha. No wonder I had some problems.

 

64 bit Firefox is usually confined to the "Nightly" builds. I used v10 in fact and it worked rather well.

 

I currently use Waterfox 64-bit and it works fine.

 

Pre-alpha? Wow, that's some test-piloting!

 

Sounds good, I'm still waiting for the RC though. I can wait, only one of my computers is 64 bit anyway LOL!

 

Let's wait a little bit, until it becomes stable.
There is no rush...

 

64bit Chrome is in the works, that's confirmed. It's already available on linux.

64bit Firefox for Windows has been out for months, just not officially supported.

 

I had a feeling that there was a Linux version.

Yes, but I'll wait until the official version is released. What do you reckon happens when I download a 64 bit browser onto a computer that has the 32 bit version already on it?

Would the 64 bit appropriate any of the profile folder/s so that it would keep existing (originally 32 bit) bookmarks etc? A bit like IE 9, which has both versions on Windows 64 bit, but obviously share folders as bookmarks inter alia are also shared.

 

They would probably both install side by side and share the appdata/ profile folder.

 

OK thanks. I reckoned as much. I'm not sure how many of the extensions that could be used on 64 bit.

 

They should all work on 64bit. There might be some issues with large numbers/ longs.

 

That's not the case with IE 9, some extensions like Ghostery have to be ported for 64 bit. I don't use Ghostery on 64 bit btw. I think that some spellcheckers (ieSpell?) wouldn't work in 64 bit either.

Not sure what you mean.

 

Extensions are mostly just Javascript. They shouldn't have to be changed at all, the compiler (V8, Tampermonkey, Trident, etc) will handle that.

Moving from 32bit to 64bit might have issues if the Javascript deals with large numbers or variable type longs.

If it's using something other than Javascript it might have to be converted and I guess there could be other incompatibilities. I would think for the most part they don't need any changes though.

 

OK. I'm sure the extension devs are working on this (hopefully).